Mr. Speaker, before medicare, Canadian families were on their own when they got sick or injured. New Democrats understood then that this was profoundly unjust and that it ran counter to Canadians' most deeply held values.
That is why the NDP's founding leader, Tommy Douglas, set out to build a pan-Canadian public health care system rooted in the simple notion that we all have a responsibility to take care of each other and that access to health care should never depend on the size of one's bank account. Under medicare, the health of Canadian families was put before profit for the first time in our country's history, and by 1984, the Canada Health Act secured a national public health care system that has since become an essential part of our collective identity.
The Canada Health Act is legislation that puts in place conditions for the provinces and territories to receive federal funding for health care, which is within their jurisdiction. There are five key principles enshrined in the act: public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability, and accessibility.
It came as no surprise that the previous Conservative government failed to enforce the Canada Health Act. After all, in his previous job as vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, Stephen Harper went on record saying, “It’s past time the feds scrapped the Canada Health Act”, but when Canadians voted for change in the last election, they thought they would finally have a government in Ottawa willing to protect their public health care from creeping privatization.
Unfortunately, from upselling in Ontario to private MRIs in Saskatchewan, to private clinics in British Columbia, violations of the Canada Health Act are still on the rise all across Canada. Let us examine some examples.
In November 2015, the Saskatchewan government, the Conservative government of Brad Wall, voted to introduce pay-per-use MRI services, which allow wealthy individuals to jump the queue. Premier Wall himself had noted in 2009 that these clinics violate the principles of accessibility in the Canada Health Act, but he permitted the extra fees anyway.
In Ontario, there have been dozens of examples of independent health facilities charging extra fees for so-called upgraded services already covered in the public system. An example is cataract lenses, where people go to doctors for cataract surgery, a publicly covered medically essential service, and are told that if they spend an extra $400, they can get a superior lens. That is happening every day in Ontario. Despite these contraventions, Ontario has never been penalized by the federal government.
In Calgary, the Copeman private health clinic has been giving preferential treatment to fee-paying patients and raising questions about double billing the Alberta medical plan. People in British Columbia have witnessed the Cambie medical clinic openly flaunting the Canada Health Act by selling preferential access to surgeries and charging user fees prohibited by law.
In New Brunswick, draconian regulations force women to get two doctors to declare an abortion medically necessary before it is publicly funded at one of the province's two hospitals. If a woman seeks an abortion in a private facility in New Brunswick, she has to pay for it herself.
The Canada Health Act exists to guarantee universal and equal access to essential health care services for all Canadians. New Democrats believe that it is the federal government's responsibility to enforce it all across the country.
My question is this. Will the Liberal government put an immediate stop to these unacceptable violations of the Canada Health Act or will we just see more ignoring of the principles of the Canada Health Act, as with the previous Harper government?