Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this important debate.
Today we have the following motion before us:
That, in the opinion of the House, the Conservative government has broken its promise to reduce medical wait times and to provide the necessary funding and resources to achieve the goals of the First Ministers' Accord on Health Care Renewal.
If members will remember, during the election the Conservative Party made wait times reduction one of its five key priorities. It promised to implement a patient wait times guarantee to provide timely access to care for patients within clinically acceptable wait times and to enable them to be treated in another jurisdiction or by another provider.
It sounds like a grand promise, yet its federal budget provided no additional funding for wait times reduction nor any explanation of how its wait times guarantee would be implemented. What happened to the Conservatives' priority of wait times? It clearly has vanished into thin air. It is a very serious Conservative failure and one that Canadians clearly do not forget.
The Conservatives have abandoned their promise to implement a national wait times guarantee. It remains, like so many issues with this government, in rhetoric only, not in reality. The Conservatives promised to meet with provincial and territorial health ministers this fall, but no meeting has yet to take place. When it comes to reducing wait times in Canada, they have offered nothing but vague statements and piecemeal projects.
In sharp contrast, the Liberals made wait times and other aspects of our cherished health care system a real priority.
For example, our fall 2004 Speech from the Throne reflected our government's strong commitment to health care, the one social policy that Canadians consistently identified as their number one priority. This is certainly true in my riding of York West. I conducted a survey earlier on in the year, and consistently my constituents chose health care as the issue that was most important to them, just as it was a priority for the Liberal government then.
That Speech from the Throne, first and foremost, outlined our efforts to implement our 10 year health care plan. Working with the provinces and the territories, this plan would have enhanced publicly delivered health care in Canada for years to come, ensuring that health care would be accessible to all Canadians, regardless of where they lived or their ability to pay.
Our strategy included $41 billion to go to the provinces, starting with $3 billion each year for the first two years. As well, $500 million in Canada health transfer payments for the fiscal year 2005-06 would have led to enhanced home care services and catastrophic drug coverage, clearly something that is very badly needed in our country. This would have brought the total cash transfers for health to the provinces and to the territories from $16.5 billion in 2005-06 to about $24 billion in 2009-10.
My government had also committed to provide $4.5 billion over the next six years, beginning in 2004-05, for the wait times reduction fund. A further $500 million for the purchase of medical equipment and $700 million over five years would have gone to improve the health of our first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples.
The provinces and the territories had agreed to produce information on outcomes so Canadians could be assured that their money was being spent where it should be, securing for them, their families and their communities the best access to the best possible health care.
However, as important as this plan was, our 2004 throne speech went further than that. We pledged to take action to help keep more Canadians out of the health care system by exploring new ways to encourage healthy living through enhanced sports activities at both the community and the competitive levels. We reaffirmed our government's desire to proceed with new health protection legislation and welcomed the development of the pan-Canadian public health network, which would help coordinate a response to public health emergencies.
In September 2004, the Liberal government was proud to sign the 10 year plan to strengthen health care with Canada's first ministers, which set a deadline of December 31, 2005 for benchmarks to be established. With the provinces and the territories we set out wait time benchmarks for five priority areas: cancer treatment, cardiac care, sight restoration, joint replacements and diagnostic imaging. These were important areas.
We continued to recognize the need to invest in reducing wait times. In our 2005 budget, the Liberal government allocated $5 billion over 10 years under the wait times reduction fund to assist the provinces and the territories in reducing wait times.
There is more. During the 2006 election, the Liberal government promised that it would implement a Canada health care guarantee in order to ensure that Canadians had timely access to care. Aspects of this guarantee included the following: a $75 million health care guarantee fund that would assist patients and a family member with travel and accommodation costs to a public facility in another province for quicker access to necessary medical procedures; $300 million for regional centres of specialized care in university teaching hospitals; and, $50 million for the Canada health infoway to accelerate wait list management technologies, such as registries, booking systems and electronic health records.
The Liberal Party of Canada remains committed to a strengthened and renewed public health care system. We believe that through reduced wait times we can ensure that our system of health care remains sustainable for future generations. We had pledged the $41.3 billion to restore confidence in our universal public health care system, including the $5 billion to establish a wait times reduction fund.
Until the NDP forced the election last November, we had made significant achievements in honouring this commitment.
During the 2006 election campaign, the Conservatives promised to implement a wait times guarantee but failed to outline how much money it would cost or how it would be implemented. We are still waiting to hear when those things will happen and how they will happen.
Does the minority Conservative government plan to download these new costs on to the provinces and the territories without any additional financial resources to do so? Probably.
The Conservatives also indicated that they would be willing to send patients to another country if they could not access necessary medical services in their home province. In all likelihood, the other country would be the United States, a country where approximately 40% of the population does not have any access to health care.
The Liberals believe that we need the necessary reforms to keep our health care system sustainable and accessible to all Canadians so they can receive the treatment they require in a timely fashion. I do not believe the solution is to out source the challenge in our health care system to other countries.
The Conservatives dumped wait times from their priority list very early on in their interim government's mandate. Sadly, wait times are only one of many areas in which the minority Conservative government has failed Canadians.
Other examples that I might add today include the following. Despite posting a $13 billion surplus, the government axed $17.7 million to improve Canada's literacy skills, something that is extremely important to all of us when we are working to ensure that all Canadians have a chance to succeed and to fulfil their dreams. It also cut $5 million from the Status of Women Canada. As if that was not bad enough, the bad government also removed the word “equality” from the department's mandate, not recognizing that women still only earn 71¢ to every $1 that a man earns. That is not equal.
The minority Conservative government also forfeited Canada's independent voice on global affairs in favour of aligning itself with the current U.S. administration.
It also turned its back on Kyoto and scrapped Canada's climate change programs, leaving Canada in an environmental limbo as temperatures soar to record levels and areas in the west, such as British Columbia, get snow and cold that they have not had for many years.
It rushed into signing a flawed agreement on softwood lumber with the United States, ignoring the voices of industry representatives.
It also raised income taxes for the lowest income Canadians and did not even tell them, just simply tried to slide it by.
It backtracked on international scholarships.
It cancelled the precious child care agreements that were signed with all 10 provinces, which was a major new social program for Canada, and left thousands of families out of the new child care allowances because it never publicized how to apply.
