Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his question, but really it is a no-brainer. When it comes to star wars or health care, health care gets the nod, but I do not believe the star wars program being proposed is really going to consume a lot of money. Probably we have spent more on the sponsorship scandal, but let us not get into the actual numbers on that.
I think the member brings up another point. He said that really the spokes did not fall off the wheel until the early 1990s, when the money came out of the system. We have to understand the ideology at that time, which was that the drivers of costs in health care were doctors. The ideology was to get rid of the doctors and get rid of the costs. That was false at that time and the doctors said so. They said that in a decade we would be running into big problems. Here we are, running into big problems.
At the same time, when we pulled those dollars out we lost a tremendous number of nurses and doctors to south of the border and to other countries, for two reasons: number one, because of the stress of the jobs, and number two, there were not the jobs because they were just shut down.
It was our youngest, brightest and best who went south of the border because of the seniority of the unions within our hospitals. Now we have the older nurses, who actually at the time were very good nurses but who are getting to the place where they are burned out. They have to leave. That multiplies the problem as far as human resources is concerned.
There are two fundamental problems in our health care system today that have to be addressed. They are the wait list and the human resources shortages. They are actually coupled together. Obviously more money will help, but not just more money for no reason. We have to put in more money for a reason and we have to be able to make sure that the provinces are not let off the hook, because they are also political animals, one might say. The easiest thing for them to do is to throw money at the problem so that all things will go away.
We have to put health care on a sustainable course, so we have to drill deeper into some of the problems and look at some of the solutions. We have to see where the money is actually going and make sure that we have enough accountability within the system to be able to drive it. If we fail in that, we will lose our system, and that is not what the Conservative Party wants at all.