Mr. Speaker, I am proud to take part in today's debate and support the Bloc motion.
It has been a longstanding policy of the NDP to press governments at both the provincial and federal level to provide adequate funding for our health care system. We as a political party have a proud tradition of supporting a public medicare system, one that the former premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas, initiated in Canada. Had it not been for the work done by that government, we believe Canada would not have a national medicare program. We are very proud of that fact.
We have proposals and suggestions as to how to reform the system. A good deal of those were seen in the Romanow report. Mr. Romanow, another former premier of Saskatchewan, worked extensively on dealing with medical costs and the provision of medical services while he was premier. He conducted a massive study and one that clearly showed a way forward for the government and the country with regard to dealing with the costs of medicare and with the issue of quality within the medicare system.
Canada has a position in the world for which we can all be proud. We do not have to apologize to anybody in the world in terms of the quality of care that we provide. However it is not perfect and there is a need for improvement. I think everybody working in the system acknowledges that.
I would like to deal with a couple of issues and specifically address the resolution before the House today urging the government to finally step forward.
Before I was elected to the House of Commons, in the 1990s I watched the push for the privatization of the health care system in Canada. It was interesting that back when the NDP had no status as a political party in the House of Commons, the issue of health care rarely came up in the House. It was not until our party received status again in 1997 that the issue of health care was pushed back on to the political agenda, which led ultimately to the Liberal government being forced to advance funds to the system, to stop downloading the cost to the provinces and to take on, to a full degree, its responsibility.
We saw the government, in the late summer to early fall of 2000, scramble to declare that money would be put into the system. However it was not what the provinces wanted and needed, and the government still has not met those demands.
The resolution that we see before us today is a reflection of the need for the government to take on its proportional responsibility for medicare costs in Canada, which it still has not accomplished. That is why the resolution is before the House today and it is one that we are happy to support.
If we go back in history, it was quite clear that when the original arrangements between the provinces and the federal government were made as to who would bear what costs, the federal government would bear 50% of the costs. That is no longer what we are asking for because the government has not come near that.
It was interesting to listen to the last speaker playing with numbers again. The Romanow report set out in a very clear manner that the federal government was not meeting its proportional responsibility for the cost of medicare. That was the largest and most complete study we have ever had and it was one that clearly pointed the finger at the federal government by stating that it had to meet its responsibilities but that it was not at this point.
As a result of the Romanow report, and as this resolution proposes, we are telling the federal government that it must meet the 25% quota. We can play with the tax credits and the shifting of tax benefits down to the provinces but we should ignore that. That will take up the other 25% to get the government back to its 50%. It has to move from the 16% of actual dollars being spent up to 25%. The government has to phase that in and do it as rapidly as possible.
We could spend some time debating where those funds could come from. We will hear the government's plea of poverty, as we have so many times, but, of course, we get to the end of the year and into the next budgetary period and we find out that the surplus is three, four, five, six times what the government said it would be.
We heard from the current finance minister that there would only be a $2 billion surplus and that maybe it could be given to the provinces. We now know, at the end of the third quarter, that it is over $5 billion and that it will be close to an $8 billion surplus for the 2003-04 year.
The funds are there. If we look at the budgetary projections for the next number of years, that type of surplus will be available and a portion of it needs to be spent on health care.
Mr. Speaker, I forget to mention that I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Churchill.
I want to move on to the whole issue of pharmacare. One of the former finance ministers under the Conservative government was recently quoted in a newspaper article talking about the escalating costs of health care. I do not know if he addressed it at all but a good deal of the escalating costs, way above the inflationary rates in other budgetary items, are because of the escalating costs that we have in pharmacare.
Several things can be done with regard to pharmacare. From our experience, both in Canada and elsewhere, we know there is a substantial over-prescribing of medication, which does affect the quality of care. When people are over-prescribed medications there can be a direct negative result to their health.
We also know that if we did not have the patent protection that we provide and if we were able to do more bulk buying, those could be ways to bring the cost of drugs more under control. We should be looking at the patent legislation as a way of reducing the cost. We could be looking at bulk buying in a much more efficient way. I would point to Australia and its experience in the way it has driven some of its drug costs down, perhaps the most effective on the globe.
Finally, there is the whole issue of providing additional assistance to the doctors and the pharmacies in prescribing medication and to try to get that under control.
I want to address one final point before I run out of time. Again this goes back to the article by Mr. Wilson in the newspaper recently. We have heard from others about the escalating costs. One of the ways of getting around that is to go with what they call the PPP, the public-private partnership arrangement. It has been addressed a number of times and particularly in the Romanow report that the PPP is not the answer. In the end it will cost the system more because it costs private partnerships more to borrow money and, of course, it costs more because there is a profit motive in the delivery of those services and a percentage taken off for that. That is right around the globe.
We can go to any number of places, not just health care, but to a number of other public services where PPP has been attempted and has consistency been shown to be more expensive than government taking on the responsibility directly.