Mr. Speaker, I thank the House for giving me the opportunity to finish my remarks on the motion for concurrence by the New Democratic Party.
I was talking earlier about the futility of witness presentations under the Conservative majority government and the inability of Conservative members at the health committee to use their intelligence and goodwill to listen to expert advice and testimony supporting concrete recommendations for change. These recommendations would remedy some of the challenges and problems that our aging population faces in specific areas like health promotion and disease prevention, access to medications, housing, long-term and chronic care, home care and community-based multi-disciplinary community care models, all of those kinds of things that we heard so clearly from witnesses. Conservative members sadly were unmoved and unrelenting in their fixed ideation and slavishness to their marching orders to maintain the status quo, to say nothing of ignoring the evidence and accepting change to the government's fixed path.
Parliamentary committees have become a farce and so have reports from them. I can only speak for the health committee and the report that we are discussing today. Conservative members do a disservice to their own constituents when they do not look at what they could do to better the health of the population, to deal with the problems that the aging population faces.
I spoke earlier about the misrepresentation of public policy by the Conservatives, where they say they have been doing certain things and we find out that they have not. Their words have no teeth; there is no action. In fact, they are cutting back on a lot of the health programs and policies that may have made life different for the aging population and chronically ill.
When we look at things such as rising obesity, nothing is going to change until the minister decides to regulate trans fats and salt. Nothing is going to change with diabetes until the minister looks at regulating sugars in food, as she has been advised by expert panels and her own department. Yet she still refuses to do this. Nothing is being done about cardiovascular disease, mental illness or depression. All of these programs are being cut. Whatever people say we should be doing, especially expert witnesses at committee, absolutely nothing is being done to change the lives and the health of Canadians. The Minister of Health does absolutely nothing. When we ask her questions, she has nothing to say. Members of the Conservative Party on the health committee simply rubber-stamp the status quo. That is really sad.
Even if the Conservatives' mantra, that we should not look to the federal government because this is the role of the provinces, were true, the minister has a direct responsibility for aboriginal people, the RCMP, the armed forces and the Inuit, who have the worst health outcomes. Seniors and populations in the north have a high incidence of arthritis, autoimmune diseases and rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. Nothing is being done to deal with that. Seniors have a high incidence of diabetes. They are facing vision loss and mobility problems because of diabetes. The government never mentions this.
We heard at committee that housing is a major issue for seniors. Seniors who are chronically ill age better at home and do better in the community, according to evidence-based medicine. We heard from everyone that community care and multi-disciplinary clinics run by doctors and nurses, psychologists and nutritionists can do more to allow people to remain healthy in their communities, who then do not need the kind of services in acute care hospitals that cost the system a lot of money. We know that seniors do not do well in hospitals, where they get infections and seem to get sicker.
Here are all the answers. This is not new; this did not only come out at the committee hearings we had on chronic disease and aging. This is evidence that has been carefully studied and everyone knows about it. It has been around for the last six years. Nothing has been done and nothing is being done.
We look at housing. There is no mention of poverty among the elderly. In fact, we see changes that would increase the retirement age to 67 when we know that a lot of people who have chronic back and mobility problems or high stress levels from work need to retire sooner. We would have a lot of people retiring very ill. This is the conundrum. This is another example of the New Democrats rushing around to support the Conservatives, trying to get concurrence in a report that the New Democrats disagree with and we disagree with, which is why we wrote dissenting reports. However, it continues to happen.
The New Democrats make decisions such as this, which puts everyone in a conundrum. If we vote for concurrence, I have accepted the fact that this do-nothing, ridiculous sham of a report would be accepted. If we say no and vote against it, the dissenting report that we brought together is not going to be accepted. At the end of the day, the Liberal Party is going to vote for the best thing and that is that we will be voting against this concurrence motion because there is no way, in good conscience, that we can accept the report that came out of that particular—