Mr. Speaker, the motion before the House today reads as follows:
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.
I want to start by dealing with the term “accountability”. It is a term that has seized this place since the beginning of Parliament. I participated as a panellist at a conference here in Ottawa on the subject matter and found it had many definitions. One of the definitions for a starting point is what is included in Webster's dictionary. It basically says that accountability is where one explains and/or justifies one's actions or decisions. Therefore, when people are accountable, that is what they have done.
In addition to that, there is a degree of accountability. People could be accountable if they explain or justify their action or decision but have they given us all of the facts? Have they given us everything we should know and been totally forthright in the information?
In the financial industry, when someone issues a prospectus for the sale of securities there is a criteria that must be applied with regard to the disclosure, and that criteria is that everything in the document must be true, full and plain. I want members to remember the criteria of full accountability is explaining and justifying one's actions and decisions in a manner that is true, full and plain. I think we will find out that the government has not been accountable.
The Conservatives did in fact abandon their promise to implement a national wait times guarantee. It was one of their priorities. In the 2004 health accord that was negotiated by the previous Liberal government, $41 billion had been set aside, based on negotiations with the provinces, to establish the benchmarks that we would be pursuing in terms of providing some targets for the health care industry to shoot for.
Those negotiations led to a $41 billion 10 year funding agreement to ensure funding was in place to not only establish these benchmarks but also to allow the health care industry to meet them. That is different than a wait times guarantee. A wait times guarantee is: what happens if the benchmark is not met? Is it the patient who has to suffer? I had a daughter who had cancer. She had to wait 16 weeks to get her radiation treatment. The clinical criteria for that type of treatment for a cancer patient is 10 weeks. I know, very personally, what it means to Canadians when they cannot get the medically necessary services and treatment for their illnesses when they need it.
The Conservatives promised to meet with the provincial premiers and health ministers this fall but no meeting took place. The federal wait times adviser delivered his final recommendations to the Conservative government six months ago and yet there has been no action on these recommendations.
The Conservatives recently announced an on reserve pilot project for pregnant aboriginal women under the guise of a wait times reduction plan. This was a pilot program, something that they could do quick and dirty to say that they had started and that they were doing something. Providing medically necessary services to pregnant women on aboriginal reserves on a pilot basis seems to be a no-brainer. This is not something that is discretionary. It is medically necessary and it is not optional. However, the government seems to think that Canadians can somehow be convinced or fooled into believing the government is doing something. Parliamentarians are not fooled by this.
The fact is the Prime Minister during the election campaign made a statement, and I am going to read it into the record yet again. On December 2, 2005, he said:
I am pleased to announce that one of the first acts of a new Conservative government will be to sit down with the provinces to develop a Patient Wait Times Guarantee....We will bring all governments back to the table, not to bicker about more money but to set wait time targets across the country and figure out a plan to begin meeting them. That process will begin immediately after the election, and conclude in 2006.
Promise made, promise broken, no question about it. The government promised Canadians during the election campaign a number of little goodies. If elected, it was going to give some tax breaks. It was going to give $100. It was going to give some textbook tax credit. It was going to give a transit pass tax credit. There is no integrated plan. There is no integrated economic plan. There is no social plan, never mind whether it is integrated. There is no social plan.
The Conservatives tried to buy an election and they did. Canadians went for what they felt were promises they could rely on, and what happened? It did not really happen, and in fact what is happening now is we are finding out that we cannot trust the Conservative government. We cannot trust the Conservatives to keep their promises.
Remember the income trusts. The Conservatives promised in the last Parliament and throughout the last election campaign that they would not tax income trusts. What did they do? They turned around and all of a sudden announced that they were going to tax income trusts. That was a broken promise. It was the mother of all flip-flops in terms of the severity of the free fall of the marketplace that cost $35 billion in lost wealth. Many of those people were seniors who relied on those investments for their retirement, which they worked hard for and which they deserve.
The Minister of Health said publicly that the money for the guaranteed wait times, this fail-safe, this insurance policy for Canadians to get the services they need if they are not delivered within the clinically advised wait time period, was in the $41 billion 2004 health accord. Each of the provincial health care ministers and the premiers said, “Excuse me, Mr. Federal Health Minister, there was nothing in that accord that had anything to do with a wait time guarantee”. The accords had to do with benchmark establishment.
Somehow the Conservative government thinks that it can play with words, dipsy-doodle around, confuse everyone and make them believe that somehow it is doing something. Health care, I believe, is still the number one priority for Canadians, and there was no money in the Conservative budget for health care.
Now the Conservatives are saying that the wait times guarantee was provided for in the 2004 health accord. If the health minister is correct in his assumption that the moneys were in the 2004 health accord, how could the Conservatives during the last election promise to do something that had already been delivered? It makes no sense. Yet it was one of their top five priorities. It cannot be the case. Maybe the health minister has misled Canadians and misled this House. That is very serious because all of a sudden, Canadians have yet another example of where they cannot trust the Conservative government.
The recent economic update is another example. The Conservatives said that they are going to reduce the net debt by 2021, how wonderful. Have a look at the numbers. One of the things we find when dealing with net debt is that the amount of debt, which is the federal debt and the debts of all the provinces, is offset with the value of the Canada pension plan and the Quebec pension plan.
The actuarial valuation of those two pension plans today is about $110 billion. By 2021 it is going to rise to $427 billion simply because of the investments and the number of baby boomers that have been paying their premiums by 2021 to make sure that it is all going to be there. The appreciation within CPP and QPP is going to be $317 billion.
The government is going to get the net debt down by taking credit for the appreciation in the Canada pension plan and the Quebec pension plan. This is nonsense. It is smoke and mirrors. This is deception at its worst.
Canadians do not understand what net debt is. What they should understand is that the government will be doing absolutely nothing to achieve that goal, other than to say, “Whatever the appreciation in the Quebec and the Canada pension plans is we are taking credit for it and, look, we have reduced it”. That is nonsense. It is silly and irresponsible. We cannot trust the Conservative government. It is irresponsible.
During the debate today I heard some members say, “Look at what you did, $25 billion in cuts to the transfers to the provinces,” as though this were something that the Liberals just did. The fact is the Liberals were elected in 1993, after nine years of the Mulroney government. I should add that there was not one balanced budget during the nine years of Conservative rule. In fact, for the year ended March 31, 1994, only a couple of months after the Liberals took office and Parliament started to meet, the deficit for that fiscal year was $42 billion. In one year $42 billion more was going out than was coming in. It was totally fiscally irresponsible, total mismanagement.
Mark my words, we are heading down the same road again. The government is dismantling everything the former Liberal government put in place. We can see in the fiscal update that the projected surplus is going down.
Canadians will understand that when there is a $42 billion deficit in one year there are two ways to deal with a loss situation. If a business is losing $42 billion a year, it is going to lose $42 billion the next year unless something changes. The government can do two things. It can increase revenue, which means increasing taxes to Canadians, or it can reduce expenses.
The former Liberal government did not increase taxes. What it had to do was to shave back and cut back government through a program review. It was hurtful for Canadians. We understood that. It was tough on every aspect of Canadian life. At the time, the observers of Canada's situation said we were like a third world country. Our debt to GDP ratio was off the charts. The vast majority of tax dollars was going to pay interest on debt. That was the reality. The debt was already up to $500 billion and it was adding another $42 billion in 1994, another $20 billion in 1995 and another $15 billion in 1996.
It took three years to get the fiscal house in order, to get the first balanced budget. We had a small surplus in 1997. Not only did the Liberal government balance the budget each and every year since that time, but it ran good surpluses and it paid down enough debt. Where is the debt today? When the Liberals took office with a $42 billion deficit for the year, the national debt just before that statement came out was about $500 billion.
Today after all of the years of running those surpluses, we are at $480 billion, about $20 billion less than back in 1993. The reason is that when faced with a tremendous annual deficit of $42 billion, the debt is ratcheted up. The debt continued to go up because $42 billion could not be cut out of the country's spending in one year. It could not be done; it was impossible. It had to be done in stages.
It was fiscally responsible to get our house in order. What has happened? The transfers to the provinces for health care, social services and post-secondary education are at the highest levels they have ever been. There is no point in resting on one's laurels. We still have to do better. Even the Liberals in the last election had a program to build on the 2004 health accord.
In the election campaign there was $75 million to establish the health care guarantee fund, which 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. There was another $300 million for regional centres of specialized care in university teaching hospitals. A further $50 million was promised for the Canada Health Infoway to accelerate wait list management technologies, such as registries, book systems and electronic health records.
There was no question about it. The $41 billion over 10 years was meant to establish, maintain and provide the necessary funding to the provinces to meet benchmarks. We knew there would be cases where the benchmarks would not be met for medically necessary services within a reasonable period of time. The Liberals established additional funding of $425 million to what was being provided on an annual basis by the 2004 health accord.
I raise that because the Conservatives' budget was supposed to be reflective of what is necessary to implement the five priorities in the throne speech, one of which was the wait times guarantee. There was no money in the budget to support a wait times guarantee. The Liberals at least had put $425 million toward that objective to make sure that wait times were not only coming down to the clinically acceptable criteria but they knew there had to be a fail-safe, a backup and insurance. That is why the money was there.
The Conservatives have not done that. Why? Is this a hollow promise? I think so. It is a promise broken. It is not going to happen. No pilot project for pregnant women on aboriginal reserves is going to take the place of a wait times guarantee promised by the government. So many promises have been broken so far that I do not know how Canadians can trust the Conservative government. They cannot trust it for anything.
As a matter of fact, I do not think there is a minister in the first two rows that is totally in the loop in his or her own portfolio because the Prime Minister is making all the decisions. He is going to make mistakes, and he has made mistakes, because he is trying to run the show himself. I just do not see how that works.
An item came up earlier in the day which has to do with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I raise it because when we talk about a wait times guarantee and benchmarks, there is one thing that we have been waiting for since before I came here in 1992 when the subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Health recommended that we have a strategy on FASD. We are still waiting. I ask the government to deal with the serious problem of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.