Mr. Speaker, our hospitals are not intended or well equipped to deal with preventing and treating chronic diseases. The government's lack of planning is forcing us to ship our seniors off to overcrowded and expensive emergency care facilities instead of providing them with appropriate long-term care. We must invest in long-term care and home-based care for seniors in Thunder Bay—Superior North and across Canada, partly in order to free up acute care beds in the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.
Investing now will save the taxpayers billions of dollars in the long run. If the government truly believes in innovative policy, then when will it start investing in it? The feds and the provinces used to each pay 50% for health care costs. Today, the federal share is less than one half of that. When will we see some adequate funding? When will we see some real, evidence-based health care policies for Canada?