Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to the motion before the House today. It is an important motion because it is about accountability, which is something that the government has been lacking in over its tenure for the last decade or so.
This issue is about the fundamental trust relationship between taxpayers, the people who work hard every day to contribute toward building this nation, and those who are entrusted with the responsibility of spending those dollars in an effective and prudent way on their behalf.
We have to look at what happened with respect to the sponsorship scandal, which has been cited by many as one of the worst disasters in Canadian history as far as accountability is concerned. That has yet to be played out. We hope that the government will look under every rock as the Prime Minister has suggested. We hope that he will become agitated with respect to the lack of accountability regarding the sponsorship scandal.
Another example of the lack of accountability by the federal government is the gun registry. The government told Canadians that the gun registry was in their best interests and would only cost $2 million. It would be a self-supporting registry. We found out a few years later that it would cost taxpayers over $1 billion and would never fulfill its obligations.
We have seen a lack of trust develop between elected representatives and Canadians. Cynicism has crept into the electoral system with less than 60% of Canadians voting in a federal election. This is because Canadians feel that we in the House are corrupt. This lack of accountability reflects on all of us. We feel we need to stand up and defend the workings of the government. We must ensure that the government is totally transparent in all its workings if we are truly going to regain that trust.
I would like to pick up on the comments made by the parliamentary secretary about Infoway, which is probably a fine foundation. There may be nothing wrong with the foundations that were set up with $9 billion from the government.
Infoway was started in 2001 with $500 million. In 2003 another $600 million was put into this foundation to allow the medical records of patients to follow them, which is a noble cause. It was given another $100 million in 2004. A total of $1.2 billion was given to Infoway so it could come up with a high tech program allowing medical records of patients to follow them. This could save countless numbers of lives.
It is not that we are worried that the money was spent inappropriately. This foundation earned $50 million just in interest on that money in the last year alone. There is perhaps more money in Infoway today than there was four years ago.
The problem is not whether the money was misused or whether it was transparent. An audit needs to be done to find out whether performance has been received for the dollars that were spent and for the money that was set aside to accomplish a goal for Canadians. This is important with respect to Infoway.
Our health committee knew there were serious problems with adverse drug reactions and with the countless number of deaths in this country because of addictions to prescription medications, the way drugs were prescribed by physicians, and the way pharmaceutical companies promoted their products to physicians. A large number of deaths occurred as a result of that.
The health committee travelled across the country last spring. We laid our report before Parliament in late March or early April indicating that in our estimation there were approximately 30,000 deaths per year as a result of these drug problems. The election came in June, just before the Baker-Norton report was filed.
We had these individuals come forward to the health committee two weeks ago to give us an explanation of what their findings were. They found that we were right and that there were 24,000 deaths in Canada per year from adverse events in our hospitals, our high tech primary care hospitals.
This does not include the number of deaths because of adverse events in our seniors' facilities, where we know that drug consumption is much higher. It does not include those individuals who die because of addiction to prescription medications such as the benzodiazepine line of drugs. In the last six months we have seen the amount of products that we thought were safe in Canada but were pulled from the shelves.
Would Infoway have saved those lives? Infoway certainly could have saved many of those lives. We know that if the medical records follow the patient a much better transparency and accountability will take place. We will link the physician, the pharmacist and the patient together with a computer program that will look at those adverse events.
Last year I brought forward a motion in the House when we realized the numbers were so drastic. The motion passed, thank goodness. My motion was that it be compulsory to report an adverse event when a physician or front line health care worker saw it.
Nothing has happened in that regard to this point. I understand in talking with the Minister of Health that he is concerned and is perhaps going to have a proposal on the table soon. We sure hope so. The motion was passed in this House because only 1% to 10% of the adverse events that are actually taking place are even reported, so we have no tracking measure whatsoever.
The importance of Infoway is not a point of discussion in today's motion. It is a very important program, but we do not know what is going on in Infoway. The reason the Auditor General would like to take a look at it is that we do not have a performance measure or a performance audit to find out if this money is being spent appropriately or why it is not being spent.
I will go into this because the parliamentary secretary talked about it. The parliamentary secretary said that Infoway is joint, between the provinces and territories and the federal government, and this is true. We have the top end bureaucrats, the health minister and the deputy ministers from each of the provinces and the federal government sitting on this Infoway panel. We know that the sponsorship scandal also had top level bureaucrats sitting on it.
What we see with Infoway is that the money has not been applied to what it was intended to be applied to. Why has this happened? Each one of these 24,000 deaths, as reported in June, has a life story. There are parents, children and victims around that death. They are not just numbers. They are not just stats. They are real people. They are real Canadians and they deserve to be protected as much as we possibly can.
The question in this motion is not so much about whether we should be transparent and have the Auditor General take a look at these foundations. That is a given. A few hours from now we will stand in this House and vote on this motion. The question will not be, “Should we support it?” The question will be, “Why should we not support it?”
If I were sitting on the government side and I had applied $1.2 billion of taxpayers' money to a foundation, I would want to know why it is not being used where it was intended to be used. I would want to know that there is some accountability. If this government does not stand and support this motion, then the question has to be asked, why would it not want that accountability for the people it represents? That becomes the question.
This was brought to my attention over a year ago. We have had the Auditor General at the health committee. I posed a question at that time. I asked if she was concerned with Infoway and the $1.2 billion and the lack of what was coming out of it. She said yes, and not only Infoway, but all of the other foundations that are not only outside the purview of the Auditor General to examine but also outside freedom of information or the ability to be able to access the information act. There are no other eyes that we can look at and ask the question, “Is there accountability in these foundations?”
This is a motion that should be supported by every one of the 308 members of this House. I would implore each of them to look very carefully at this motion and in a non-partisan way and transparent way stand and vote for this motion. It is very important for the trust level of Canadians and very important in getting to the bottom of where this money is and how it is being applied for the best interests of Canadians.