Mr. Speaker, my remarks will be divided into three matters. First, I want to talk a little about the importance of this particular hospital, as someone who has lived most of his life in an area that is served by the Queensway Carleton Hospital. Second, I would like to talk a little about the theme of equality of treatment for institutions on federal lands and how the Queensway-Carleton Hospital is being singled out for unfair and certainly very different treatment from other institutions on federal lands. Third, I would like to correct a couple of factual errors made earlier in the remarks by my hon. colleague from Ottawa West.
At the end of my debate I will be moving an amendment to the motion. The amendment has the approval of the mover of the motion, the hon. member for Nepean--Carleton.
Let us start with number one. This is a very important hospital. My former riding of Lanark--Carleton contained a number of very small towns. Carleton Place, where I live, with a population of 10,000, has a hospital, and a very good hospital I might add. Almonte, a smaller town, also has a hospital. Smiths Falls and Perth now have a united hospital with two campuses, one in each town. This is part of the reason for the vitality of smaller towns, having the capacity to serve people in the community.
The other part of the constituency I formerly represented was the city of Kanata, now part of the city of Ottawa, with a population 65,000 and it did not have its own hospital. It was only part of the catchment area covered by the Queensway Carleton Hospital, along with Stittsville, the Goulburn area, parts of the western part of the city of Ottawa and much of the former city of Nepean, a catchment area in total of several hundred thousand people. This is a very important institution. Perhaps I am biased a little in emphasizing how important it is by the fact that this is the hospital to which my mother was taken when she broke her hip a couple of decades ago and she received excellent service there.
Of course excellent service can be provided only when there is the financial capacity to provide that service. When moneys are diverted from health care to other expenditures, including rent to the National Capital Commission, then of course the ability to provide that money for health care services will not be there.
That is not necessarily a tremendously significant issue right now because the amount of rent being paid is not huge. Just now the Queensway Carleton Hospital is finishing up a 40-year lease that was signed in July 1973. The lease will expire in 2013. Right now the rent is not enormous, but in 2013 it could become a very substantial rent. Because of the uncertainty caused by no decision being taken to guarantee a reasonable rate of rent, a guarantee into the future, the Queensway Carleton Hospital is hamstrung. It is hamstrung now by the dithering of a government that will not deal with an issue which, sure, is eight years off in the future. In terms of this government, that might as well be a million years from now. In terms of investment and the sorts of investments that a hospital has to make, that is not a million years from now. Eight years is in fact a very short time horizon and the hospital cannot act unless it has certainty.
The second thing I want to talk about is equality treatment. Justice demands that all like facilities on federal lands be treated similarly. There are other hospitals on federal lands. This is not the only one. This is, however, the only one that faces this kind of uncertainty. This is the only hospital on federal lands that pays more than a nominal rent and which faces the danger of a potentially enormous increase in its rental payment in the future. This makes this hospital's situation very different from that of the other hospitals that are on federal lands.
Of course the example was already given of the Pine View Municipal Golf Course, a golf course in the city of Ottawa which pays a nominal rent to the National Capital Commission. An observation was made about the fact that it has certain obligations in addition to its nominal rent.
I am unaware of any lease signed by anyone anywhere--and I say this as someone who has a lease on a number of properties myself, including constituency offices. I have two constituency offices. I rent where I live. I have signed business leases. I have never heard of a lease that does not have obligations in it.
The nonsense that was thrown out by the hon. member that somehow this distinguishes and explains why there is no actual monetary revenue paid by this golf course is just nonsense. This is just a red herring thrown across the path to leave the impression that somehow the government is not engaged in a gross injustice when it imposes costs on a hospital that it will not impose on a golf course. And I say that as someone who loves golf.
This brings me to the third theme I have in my remarks today, the misstatements or the errors that were made in the remarks by the hon. member for Ottawa West—Nepean. I mentioned the golf course already which was one of them. The second one was about private facilities on hospital premises. She suggested, erroneously, and it was probably an honest mistake but I want to correct it now, that the hon. member for Nepean—Carleton in his motion had also talked about the idea of putting private facilities, for profit facilities, on the land currently leased by the hospital from the National Capital Commission. That is not so. What in fact the hon. member for Nepean—Carleton has said is that the hospital might be allowed in the future to sublease facilities to private practitioners, that is, to family practitioners in particular, in order that they can carry on their family practices.
There is the problem of a lack of family practitioners in Ontario. I for one do not have a family doctor right now. The member is trying to assist in dealing with this problem in his constituency. This is something that hospitals are doing everywhere, including in the province of Ontario. To suddenly discover that this is some kind of abuse of the health care system is an invention of the member for Ottawa West--Nepean. There is in fact a perfectly reasonable business case for doing this. There is a health care case for doing this. I think this is just another red herring the member has thrown out to distract us from the real issue of the injustice in the way in which the Queensway-Carleton Hospital is being treated.
Third is the issue of what the NCC can and cannot do, that somehow the NCC is an independent operator, operating out there with no political interference, that it is on its own and any problems that arise in the way the Queensway-Carleton is treated should be laid, the member suggests, at the door of the National Capital Commission. That is just not so. The National Capital Commission is under the control of the cabinet and of the government. The National Capital Commission can and does change things, or indeed is overridden by orders in council when the government decides to do so.
The government did decide to do so in a matter that it judged to be of urgency just a few months ago when it was discovered that a member of the Senate might be in a position of conflict of interest. The Treasury Board rules were changed regarding a building in the national capital area. When it is an issue the government judges to be of importance, it can act lickety-split and it should act quickly on this issue too, an issue that is of importance.
I mentioned that I had an amendment to present. In presenting this amendment, I just want to say that the member also suggested that the transfer of land, the transfer of ownership of the land is a major issue, that we ought not to alienate federal property and that it might some day go on to some other use. Of course some things could be written into the covenant of sale to deal with that. The other possibility is that the land could be leased at a nominal rate for a long period of time. That is what my amendment is going to suggest, that the federal government lease the land to the hospital for a long period of time at $1 a year.
We can test the sincerity of the member's commitment to actually try to provide these services and test whether or not it was just a non sequitur that she threw out when this amendment comes up for a vote.
Therefore, I move, with the approval of the original mover of the motion, the hon. member for Nepean—Carleton:
That M-135 be amended by:
(a) deleting the word “transferring” and replacing it with the words “continuing to lease”; and
(b) by adding after the word “dollar”, the following: “per annum, starting at the end of the current lease in the year 2013”.