Mr. Speaker, I had the honour and privilege of serving with the member in the last Parliament on the health committee and I know of her resolve on these issues. While we may not always have agreed 100% on the way to solve the problems, we always participated very well, worked very well and shared the principles.
I am pleased that she has made a reference to TB, because I think it is one the areas of public health that we have to pay a lot of attention to. My father was a victim of TB. He lost a lung to TB, which probably contributed to his death at 49 years of age. There was an outbreak of TB in my community almost 40 years ago in which hundreds of people were hospitalized. High school children and children in intermediate school were hospitalized. They lost a lot of very important years at a very important time. I know people who spent seven, eight and ten years in sanatoriums because of tuberculosis.
There is currently a fear of an outbreak in my community. At the Yarmouth Regional Hospital, approximately 750 people had to be tested for tuberculosis. I know what anxiety and fear this puts into our community. I can only imagine what anxiety levels and fears there must be in native communities throughout this country where they have to live with this fear every day.
We know that with TB, fetal alcohol syndrome, juvenile diabetes, and especially adult onset diabetes, socio-economic factors play a large part in the opportunities for those diseases to manifest themselves and spread within those communities.
We know the disappointment there must be in those communities that the Kelowna accord has been scrapped by the government, with the loss of the opportunity they had for socio-economic improvement of those communities throughout Canada, especially in the northern communities, from one ocean to the two others, where they had reached an agreement with all the provinces to deal with the basis of the problems in those communities. That $5 billion investment, a great first step, has been scrapped.
Could the member tell us her impressions of the socio-economic costs of cancelling the Kelowna accord?