Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise and give my comments on the budget. I am really torn because I would love to jump into the debate that just went on, both with regard to who has credibility on the file and past budgets and when I see what the Liberal Party has done to this nation and how we could have been debt free if we had not decided to go into deficit budgeting.
I will not do that. I really want to stick to my theme, which is health care. I want to first of all explain to this House, because so many get it wrong, that we are a party that is firmly committed to universal health care. We are a party that is firmly committed to timely access to quality care regardless of a person's individual ability to pay. We are a party that understands Canada's health care system is the number one concern of Canadians.
I do not think we have a Prime Minister who quite understands that yet. He is an individual who has absolutely no credibility with regard to health care. What he has done on health care in the last decade over the tenure of the government has to be understood before we can truly get into an understanding of what happened in this budget with regard to health care.
I will quote his words of last November 9 in the Winnipeg Free Press . He said, “The best proof of what I am going to do in the future is what I have done in the past”. If that is indeed true, then it will be a sorry state for health care in the future, because what he has done in the past has absolutely destroyed it as far as pulling the dollars and cents away from health care and leaving it to drift over the last decade.
I know that full well. I worked in the health care system for 20 years. During that time period I remember going to Red Deer, Alberta, where we had to get the best minds in Alberta to decide what we were going to do to deal with the massive deficit of $900 million in one year. To make a long story short, the removal of dollars from the federal responsibility in health care ended up on the backs of those good, hard-working men and women in the industry who took a 5% rollback in Alberta to deal with that deficit.
It is unbelievable to see a government unilaterally pull the rug out from under health care. It never discussed the idea of taking money away from health care. It just did it. The federal government never sat down with the provinces, which have the joint responsibility of delivering health care, to try to discern how to come up with a better way of perhaps adding efficiencies in the system or how it could be done over a progressive period of time. None of that took place. It was just automatic that the money was coming out of health care. It just left the health care system to fend for itself. It downloaded the responsibility.
That is the sorrowful state of what actually happened in the health care system during those early years. To make it all worse, the government hid behind what is called the CHST, the health and social transfer payment, a grouping of dollars that went to social services as well as education and health care for the provinces. The government could hide behind it. It said the actual number of dollars was more, but it was not. It just went into three different areas and therefore it reduced the budgets. It was sleight of hand. We have seen sleight of hand even in this budget, sleight of hand on how the government is dealing with the actual dollars and cents.
However, before I get into the actual budget, I also want to talk about what kind of health care system we have left after that decade. We have a health care system where over a million people right now are on waiting lists for serious surgeries. Do members realize that the wait list period has doubled over the last decade? That is, during the last 10 years there was a doubling of the wait list in the country. Health care professionals have gone to greener pastures in the south to be able to find employment. That is what happened in the mid-1990s. It has continued to happen.
The sickest workplace we have in this country is the workplace within our hospitals. Our nurses use more sick time than any other workforce in the country. The shortage of doctors and nurses is acute and will continue to be acute.
This is the legacy of a Prime Minister who has neglected health care for the last decade. He has neglected health care in this budget.
It is interesting to look at the budget and see the dollars and cents that went into health care. There is a big to-do about the $2 billion that went to health care--