Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege and a pleasure to second this motion. It is very important that we come into this House and talk about issues other than sex and corruption, which seems to have capitalized the attention of this place and discredited each and every one of us who represent members of the Canadian public. It is important that we talk about something that is near and dear to their hearts, that they are compassionate about, and that will impact them, their kids and their grandkids for generations to come.
It is important, before we start talking about health care, that we have a clear picture of what is coming at us with regard to the demographics of our country and how that will impact our health care system. We pride ourselves on our health care system. We are passionate about it and passionate about saving it, protecting it and making it better.
We have seen the Liberal government over the last decade not only removing funds from it but actually discrediting it to the point where we have doubled the number of people on waiting lists. We have a lack of human resources in our system, where 75% of doctors are refusing to take any more patients in this country right now. We are seeing a lack of nurses. We need 100,000 within the next few short years in order to refurbish the workplace within our hospital walls.
It is a serious situation when we look at the disastrous state the health care system is in right now. Before we even start dialoguing and discerning how we are going to fix that, we have to understand what is coming at us in the long term because health care, unfortunately, gets used as a political football. We look at it in four year segments, as election cycles go, and how we are going to win the next election by using health care as a vehicle. That has to stop. We do not have the luxury of doing that in this country.
When we look at the baby boomer population, the stress that it will put on the health care system will not start for a decade. Once that starts it will then begin to intensify and will keep intensifying until about the year 2040. It is important for us to mention that here because everyone in this House has to understand that, so we can clearly articulate it to the people of Canada. If we do not understand what is coming at us, there is no possible way that we can make decisions on how we can fix it.
Health care has been treated by crisis management, as patients show up at the door of hospitals, for the last half century. We must recognize that we must do more than just treat health care and patients of Canada through a crisis management approach. We must look at it in a proactive way. We must look at prevention and that is why it is important that we look at this motion today. That is why we are bringing it before the House, so we can have a healthy debate and look at what we are going to do with cancer, mental illness, heart problems and strokes, and how we are going to look at these issues in a proactive way.
It is important to mention what has happened in the last two years with regard to the health accords of 2003-04. The government implemented them, but we have seen very little action coming out of the 2003 accord. In fact, we agreed with the 2003 accord, but we saw that the provincial and federal governments actually bailed on a lot of the commitments in that 2003 accord.
I do not know what was more frustrating: the poll results that we saw on the 2004 accord or the $100,000 it took for the government to actually poll constituents and find out what they felt about that 2004 accord. The cynicism that was reflected in that poll should have been expected after what we saw come out of the 2003 accord where everybody bailed on their commitments.
Nonetheless, we know that the public's confidence in the health care system has eroded, and that is very clear in the poll that just came out yesterday or the day before. It is not surprising, but it is frustrating. It tells us that Canadians do not believe that the 2004 accord is actually going to solve all the problems. It is not going to be the fix for a generation that the Prime Minister had promised Canadians. It is not going to do anything more than play politics with health care like we have done in the past and are doing at the present time in order to win another election. That has to stop.
The motion speaks to a Canadian strategy for cancer control. I am absolutely struck at how well the strategy has been laid out by the Cancer Society. In fact it is very passionate about it. The Liberal government will tell us that it is implementing it, that it is in the Speech from the Throne and that it is supposed to be in the budget, but it is not. I was struck by the fact that an individual from the Cancer Society drove 10 hours in one day to meet with me in my riding office to explain the strategy to me.
The individual told me that just a few short years ago one in four Canadians contracted cancer in their lifetime. Today it is one in three. In a few short years it will be one in two. Those are horrendous numbers when talk about the demographic curve and the impact that will have on our health care system as we move into the 21st century. We have to understand this fact. If we do not understand it, we will be unable to solve anything.
The strategy is a preventative approach. How many cancer deaths can we prevent in the foreseeable future? Before we start draining the bucket to solve the problem, we should stop filling the bucket. By filling the bucket, I mean how do we deal with the number of overweight people? How do we deal with the health conditions of people because of their lifestyles? How do we ensure we have clean water, clean air and clean land? How will that impact our society with regard to health care?
I have had 20 years of experience in the health care system in my province of Alberta. The way we deal with mental illness in every province is a disaster.
When I sat on a regional health authority in Alberta, one statistic absolutely astounded me. It indicated that the number one reason people were hospitalized was for mental illness. It is not cancer or heart disease. People do not understand the seriousness of mental illness.
A study which came out last June indicated that 24,000 deaths within our acute care hospitals were caused by adverse events, most of those because of problems with medications. A good part of the reason why people are medicated is because of high stress and the amount of pressure placed on them. That is why we see an explosion in the number of people on benzodiazepines, antidepressants and sleep disorder medications. Until we stop thinking there is a pill for every problem and start realizing that every pill also has a problem, we will never be able to deal with these problems.
We have to look at a national strategy. We have to understand how to prevent illnesses from the start. Maybe we should look at slowing down our society with regard to the amount of pressure and stress on individuals. This would allow us to deal with some of the problems in a more proactive way.
It was interesting listening to one of the questions from my Liberal colleague with regard to the reason for having a national strategy on some of these issues.
Three thousand babies are born with fetal alcohol syndrome every year. This is an issue that the health committee dealt with recently. We brought forward a motion and debated it in the House. We sent a directive to Health Canada indicating that by June 2 we wanted a comprehensive strategy on how to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome.
At the last meeting of the health committee, Health Canada came forward with a solution. It was the most pathetic example of how it would deal with this situation. It had nothing to do with prevention and it had very little to do with the question that was asked. This directive was sent to Health Canada not just by the health committee, but by the House of Commons.
When I see that sort of approach by Health Canada and I see the kind of weak approach with regard to health care and our health care system by the Liberal government, I have to admit we have a serious problem in our country.
It is a pleasure for me to second the motion before us today. I challenge every member in the House to understand exactly what it is saying. I challenge them to vote for it. If they vote against it, they are saying they do not care about a national strategy. If they vote against it, they are saying they do not believe that prevention is the way to go. If they vote against it, they are indicating that they want to play politics with health care instead of looking at solutions. It is very important that we understand what is coming at us.
When I spoke about the demographic curve, I failed to mention the amount of obesity within our school aged children. They are going to start to have heart, stroke, cancer and diabetic problems at age 30 and 40, not at age 50, 60, 70. That will impact our health care system at the same time the demographic curve does. When we look at a realistic picture, we have to understand that we have to look at preventative solutions. We have to put people at the centre of our health care system and build a system around the needs of patients. If we fail to do that, we will fail Canadians and we will fail the health care system. The Liberals have failed them for the last decade. It is time to remove them. It is time to deal with health care the way it should be dealt with, and that is the approach before the House today.