Mr. Speaker, the Lakeshore General Hospital in Ashern, Manitoba normally operates with six doctors to service over 10,000 rural residents, including five first nations communities. Over the past few years doctors have left and the last two doctors have finally retired. Now there are no emergency or clinical services available and patients have to travel over four hours to Winnipeg for care.
Under the government, health care in rural Canada has gone from hallway medicine to highway medicine.
Why has the health minister not used the fabled foreign accreditation program or developed a long term strategy to address the terrible doctor shortages in rural Canada?