Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to Bill S-248, an act respecting national physicians’ day.
This bill designates May 1 as national physicians' day. It seeks to recognize the importance of the 125,000 resident and student physicians across the country.
In coming to my decision to support this bill, I considered the following points.
Members who have been here for four years have seen a number of days, weeks and months of various sorts to recognize great things across the country, but what could be more important to recognize than our doctors? Doctors save our lives. Every one of us is going to need a doctor at some point in our life, and usually all the way throughout, from the time we are born to the time we go into palliative care and pass on from this life. It is definitely worthy to have a day to talk about doctors and all the things they do.
From the time people decide to go into medicine, it is an incredibly long journey. We know it is difficult to get into med schools, and once they are there, they study for extremely long hours. It is a very competitive field. Once they have finished their studies, they have to do their residency. This involves extremely long hours of work, very interesting work, when they get real experiences. My nephew is a doctor. He did undergraduate work in Michigan, but got his medical training in St. Martin, which sounds like a wonderful place to get medical training. He did his residency in the U.S., so he had the opportunity to work in Detroit and Long Island. One can imagine the excellent training he got in the emergency departments there. He and so many other doctors go through all of that, and at the end of their studies and just beginning their careers, many of them have racked up between $200,000 and $300,000 worth of debt in student loans.
It is really quite a commitment to embark on becoming a doctor in the first place, and one of the problems in Canada is graduating enough doctors. There is a certain number of spots for residents. When I became the shadow minister of health, I became aware that there was an issue with the matching of residents to positions and, in fact, some of them were unable to get a position. We can imagine, after all the training doctors have gone through, how devastating that would be not to be able to pursue their life's dream. I was able to work with the health minister to address that gap.
That being said, there is a huge doctor shortage right across the country. I have been able to go from coast to coast to coast to see the state of the nation in terms of doctor shortages, and I can say there are some very dire situations. Cape Breton is missing 52 emergency room physicians and a vascular surgeon. Individuals who cut an artery there would lose a limb or die because they cannot get to Halifax in time. In Ottawa, the wait time for a family physician is six years. In B.C., there is a huge shortage of doctors. There is an incentive system there that has resulted in having more emergency room doctors than family doctors. Rural and remote spots across the country are in dire need of doctors.
I have a list of the types of doctors missing in my own riding of Sarnia—Lambton. We are missing 10 family doctors, two geriatricians, one rheumatologist, three psychiatrists, one rural emergency physician and two other ER physicians, one plastic surgeon, two anaesthetists and an otolaryngologist, though I am not sure what that is.
The government should definitely be taking a leadership role. We recognize that, while health care is executed by the provinces, the federal government has a responsibility to address this gap. We have an aging population. One in six seniors right now will become one in four seniors in six to 10 years, so we are going to need even more doctors. We are short 600 palliative care physicians and innumerable doctors for seniors.
It is time to work alongside the provinces and territories to figure out how to address what is really a disastrous shortage. Without a doctor, how is someone going to stay healthy or deal with chronic disease?
It is worthwhile having a day to celebrate doctors, but it is a bit hypocritical for the Liberal government to be bringing this forward. It was a Senate bill originally brought forward by Senator Eggleton, but the Liberals have brought it forward. As a government, Liberals have not been kind to doctors. Remember, it was the Liberal government, under the finance minister, that called doctors tax cheats. It did not recognize that when doctors have their corporations and run their medical practices, they need to accumulate passive income to buy the equipment they need to run their practices. The government wants to tax them at a 73% rate. Again, the Liberals have not treated doctors well.
If we look at the medical assistance in dying legislation that was brought forward, it was the Liberal government that did not protect the rights of conscience of doctors in this country, even though it was brought to its attention. Most recently, the Ontario court has not allowed for doctors to have freedom of conscience with respect to assisted suicide in Ontario. That has never happened anywhere else in the country, in the world, and it was the Liberal government that began that path.
When doctors are becoming doctors, it is a very long and arduous process. However, once they become doctors, they face very strenuous working conditions with very long hours. They may be working 80-hour weeks, depending on whether they have someone helping them out in their practice. As well, the Standing Committee on Health is doing a study right now about the violence that health care workers experience. I was astounded to learn that more than 60% of health care workers, including doctors, are experiencing violence from patients, frustrated family members and people who suffer from mental health and addiction issues or dementia. There is a real and serious problem that we need to address on behalf of doctors.
Many people know that I am a passionate advocate for palliative care. While we are talking about having a national doctors' day, I send thanks to the doctors at the palliative care at St. Joseph's Hospice in Sarnia—Lambton. I thank them for everything they do. I also thank the palliative care physicians across the country and those who work in that area. With the aging population we have, we need to do more to make sure that Canadians can choose to live as well as they can and for as long as they can. There are 70% of Canadians who do not have access to palliative care today.
The palliative care framework brought in under my bill, Bill C-277, has certainly helped to advance the cause. I have worked with the health minister and the parliamentary secretary, who I see is here today, to try to make sure we have training for health care workers in palliative care and the infrastructure we need in terms of hospices and broadband Internet to access virtual palliative care. As well, we need to take the innovative ideas put in place across the country, with the paramedics, for example, learning palliative care and taking that to rural and remote places, and that we take all of those ideas and make sure we build our palliative care capacity in the country.
In summary, there is more to be done. There is more to be done to support doctors, and not just their rights of conscience or the tax laws that allow them to operate here. We have to also listen to the doctors when they provide advice. The Canadian Medical Association provided a lot of input on the cannabis regulation, and it was largely ignored. While having a day for doctors to celebrate is great, there is a lot more that we could and should do to celebrate how important doctors are to each one of us. They save our lives and help us throughout our lives. I am certainly happy to stand here today with Bill S-248 and say that I will support this bill. Happy national doctors' day.