Mr. Speaker, I wish to compliment the member for introducing this motion. As a physician, it is a breath of fresh air to have health care finally discussed in this House.
I remember working in the emergency department and having to treat patients in the hallway. I remember having to airvac patients out of the town I was working in just because we did not have a health care worker, a technologist, who could do a CT scan on the person to identify potential problems.
Canadian society is in the process of slamming into a brick wall on health care because the resources that we have to pay for, what we ask for and need, are not there. As time passes, as our population ages, that gap between the supply of resources and the demands that we have on our health care system is simply going to widen. What has happened is that those who are least able to afford it are falling through the cracks. They are the ones who are being hurt by inaction. They are the ones who are going to be hurt if all we do is talk about things and fail to act.
We understand full well that the responsibility for health care is in the purview of the provinces, but nothing prevents the federal government from using its convening powers to work with the provinces that want to work with us, to get things done that we need to have done.
The fact of the matter is that we are constrained by a Canada Health Act that was good in its time but needs to be modernized. It cannot function and it cannot do what needs to be done. Our provinces cannot do what they need to do, if we are going to be constrained by the situation we have today.
If we look at the top 20 health care systems in the world, 17 of those health care systems are in Europe. This ridiculous discussion that we have, that if it is not ours it must be in the U.S., is a nonsensical debate. The real debate we should be having, and the answers we should be pursuing, is who has the best health care system. We need to just peer out toward Europe and we will find that 17 of the 20 best health care systems in the world are there.
What are their characteristics? The member, quite rightly and wisely, put technological development as one of her three requirements. If we look at Europe, it uses IT tools much more effectively than we do. We absolutely must be able to use IT tools to reduce duplication, reduce waste, and improve efficiencies in the system. It is ludicrous that we are so far behind the times.
The second point in this area that Canadians might need to know is that while we discover all these remarkable things in medicine, Canadians have access to them in a limited way. The reason for this is because provincial governments have to withhold or ration care and they cannot afford to provide the best care that is available, so the scientific discoveries that we are making are not available to the Canadian public because governments do not have the money to pay for them. There is this gap and Canada ranks somewhere in the 20th to 25th range in terms of access to new technologies by our citizens.
The second part dealing with health care professionals, and the member was again right to put this in, is that we desperately need a national health care workforce strategy. As we get older, our health care professionals are getting older as well. The average age of a nurse is about 42. The average age in some specialties in medicine, as a physician in my profession, is somewhere in the fifties. We cannot train a doctor in four years. It takes 12 years or more to train certain types of specialists.
We cannot easily reproduce them. We desperately need this strategy to be implemented with the provinces, not only for physicians and nurses but also for technicians and other health care professionals who are part of our team and who enable us to serve the public we treat.
The third area deals with healthy living and prevention. Last week I was privileged to attend the big Pediatric Academic Societies' conference in Vancouver. It is the largest of its kind in the world and 6,000 of the top pediatric scientists in the world were there. One of the big issues that was talked about, as the hon. member mentioned, is the epidemic of childhood obesity.
Dr. Tremblay from Montreal did a phenomenal study comparing Canadians from 1981 to today and his results were shocking. He found that from 1981 to today, the level of obesity has increased dramatically. Fitness levels have plummeted. Part of the reason is that the average Canadian child watches 40 hours of television per week or the child is in front of a screen playing video games. This is ridiculous. We were not designed to do this.
As a result, we are seeing chronic diseases that are now shifting lower and earlier in the demographics. Younger people are having higher incidences of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular problems. The result of this is that it is putting a huge and increasing burden on our health care system, and that in combination with our aging population will essentially break the back of our health care system unless we act and act quickly.
One of the motions I introduced recently is very simple. Why do we not all advocate for parents to turn off the television sets and turn off the video games one night per week, just one night a week? Get kids out and active. If they are out and active, engaging in free play, they will be able to dramatically change not only their physical abilities but also their mental abilities.
We have found that we can now actually peer into the developing child's brain. We know that from the prenatal stage through the first five years of life we can have the most dramatic impact upon the trajectory of that child into adulthood.
Subject children to a loving, caring environment with proper nutrition, where they are subjected to being read to and actually reading books later on, and what happens is that the connections in the brain actually happen well. Conversely, subject children to violence and sexual abuse, where they are witnessing drug abuse and violence, and give them poor diets, the neural connections that take place happen very poorly.
As a result of that, because the frontal cortex and the lower parts of the brain are not connected well, we see a much higher incidence of drug use, juvenile crime, poor outcomes in school, more dependence on welfare, and poor social and economic outcomes.
It is essential that what we do in the first five years of life has a dramatic effect on the trajectory of that child. If the government wants to really do something in terms of reducing crime, for Heaven's sake, work with the provinces to enable them to have an early learning program for children, during the prenatal stage and through the first five years of the children. If we do that, it will have a dramatic and profound impact upon the life of those children.
Kids need free play. The other thing we can advocate in the public health aspect is to take kids to the library. Drop them off at the library, leave them there for an hour, let them roam the books, and let them use their imagination. If that is done, then they will have a chance to read. We know that literacy is one of the most powerful ways in which we can improve the trajectory of children later on in life.
These are simple things, inexpensive and easy to do. Also, kids who are plugged into TV sets and video games are not engaging in learning or having the imagination and the social skills they need to function well as adults.
That kind of free play and socialization may sound subtle in many ways, but it has to be done because those subtle interactions that take place enable the neuro connections and enable children to move forward and acquire the skills sets they need later on.
To summarize, in order to enable us to have a health care system that serves the public later on, which we must have, we have to work with like-minded provinces. We have to modernize the Canada Health Act. We have to bury our ideology. We have to pursue the facts and the science. The solutions are out there and we have to implement them. Talking is not going to save anybody's life. Only action will.
Second, we have to implement the national workforce strategy with the provinces. Again, let us ensure that we look at solutions that work. Let us look at Europe. Why does Europe have 17 of the top 20 systems? Let us look at their funding models, how they enable the governments and the private sector to work together, how they treat their health care workers, how they acquire and retain health care workers, and what they do in terms of prevention.
That package of solutions will enable us to ensure that our citizens, when they get sick, will have a health care system that will be there to treat them and will treat them well.