Mr. Speaker, our government has a proven track record on delivering support to the provinces for health care. We increased health care transfer payments to the provinces by 6% each year for the past three years.
In the last Parliament we worked with the provinces to shorten wait times, and we saw some significant decreases in wait times in our health care system. Our transfers of those dollars to the provinces proves we are concerned about health care and patient wait times.
I was at a fundraising foundation's reception for the local hospital in Vernon, the Vernon Jubilee Hospital. It was very encouraging to hear one of the physicians from that hospital say that they are seeing some new equipment and some capital investment in the hospital, and that what our government is doing in the financial support for the provinces is great. That was very encouraging.
With regard to our initiatives around the issue of crime, when we made our announcement about our challenges with drugs and said that we would attack that problem in our society, we looked at rehabilitation, education and enforcement. These three things were funded equally. Our concern is to make sure we educate the youth of this country on the challenges drugs bring to life and on the need to stay away from them.
We increased the funding for Veterans Affairs and we established an ombudsman so that veterans could have a better resource for appealing any decisions for benefits. Those measures were brought forward by our government in the last Parliament. I spoke with some of our veterans during my campaign, and I found they were deeply impressed by the increased benefits and the easy access to Veterans Affairs.
We have done it in the past and we will continue to do it in the future.