Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to join the House from beautiful southwest Nova Scotia, where it is a little rainy. We do not have a whole lot of COVID-19 floating around, but it seems that here in Nova Scotia we are having a resurgence of variants. Due to a lack of vaccines, we are going to see a bit of the third wave the rest of Canada has seen over the last number of weeks and months.
Because it has been a year and a half since many of us were elected, and we have not had the opportunity to speak to a budget, I would like to start my first response to it as a new MP with something a little more Nova Scotian. I will talk about something that is a bit more positive in the budget, which is important to my area and extremely important to me and my family. It is the national framework for diabetes. This is something in the budget that I support.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin here in Canada, something Banting and Best were able to do at the University of Toronto. We as Canadians continue to celebrate being a part of this historic change in the lives of people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The budget provides $25 million over five years, starting in 2021-22, to Health Canada for additional investments into research in diabetes, including juvenile diabetes, and surveillance and prevention, to work toward the development of that national framework.
That is extremely important to me and my family because I am the dad of a type 1 diabetic. My son just recently, for lack of a better description, celebrated his fifth anniversary of being a diabetic. I can see from what he has had to go through, and what other diabetics across this country have had to go through, that there is no real standard of care for those individuals.
It is good to see Canadians get together. We need to work with our provinces to make sure that is going to happen. These are very positive developments for JDRF and Diabetes Canada. I hope this continues and that more emphasis will be put on some of the chronic diseases that Canadians continue to suffer from.
I wish the rest of the budget were as positive, but unfortunately, it is not. On the health care side of things, this budget is very lax in how it is going to help with COVID-19 and respond to the needs of the provinces for extra help, especially when it comes to the deferred health care that has happened over the last number of months.
I am a member of the health committee, and a couple of weeks ago we had radiologists in to present before the committee. They estimated that 380,000 Canadians have had their tests delayed, whether it was a test for cancer, a colonoscopy, or the like. If we start to delay health care, greater issues might happen. For people who are diagnosed with cancer, it might be a different level of cancer. They could be at stage three or four, which is much more difficult to treat.
The provinces have been asking for a top-up in their health transfers over the last number of years. That does not show up in this budget, yet we saw the Prime Minister go out the next day and say the government was going to do that after the pandemic is done.
The way things are going right now, the pandemic is going to be with us for quite some time. I wonder when that extra investment is going to be in the Canada health transfers. I believe they are asking for about $4 billion. In the scope of the $100 billion of extra, I would call, election funding the government has put forward, the $4 billion they are asking for seems like quite a bargain.
Let us move on from health care and talk about something that is important for the coastal communities here in southwest Nova Scotia. Quite honestly, this area is based on the fishery and access to that fishery. I want to talk about small craft harbours. Small craft harbours might not be important to many people across Canada. However, those of us who use them, and people who have their families in the fishing industry, want to see investments in wharves. They are part of our highway system. They are part of our business park, so to speak.
We see an investment of $300 million over two years in small craft harbours. That is a drop in the bucket of what is required to improve the safety of our ports and wharves and to adjust to the changes in vessel sizes and vessel safety over the last number of years. There is not enough room in a lot of these ports.
I was on beautiful Brier Island the other day meeting with the port authority of Westport. They have a fabled wharf in the Bay of Fundy that sees some of the highest tides in the world, but they have not had an expansion or an adjustment to their port in well over 50 years. They have had little projects along the way. There has been a bit of a breakwater and maybe a change to one of the wharves, but nothing has actually happened for them in that amount of time. The $300 million is going to be very difficult to sell, because we could spend way more than that just on the 27 wharves that require it here in West Nova. A number of wharves on our list are condemned. Fishers are still using them, but they have been condemned by small craft harbours because they do not have the dollars to do the work.
While I am on the topic of the fishery, I want to talk about the safety of our fishers and a couple of experiences we have had in the last few months. The Chief William Saulis, a scallop dragger out of Digby, basically out of Yarmouth, was lost and seven men were lost with it. It took a lot of time to find. There was not enough money in the budget for the Coast Guard to go out to recover the bodies of the men who were lost. We need to do more to make sure that our vessels are safe and that we have the systems to go out and actually help them.
In another example, the scallop dragger Atlantic Destiny went down off of Georges Bank and 32 souls were saved, but we learned a number of things that I do not see in this budget. The fuel for search and rescue is not available at the airport that is closest to the port. The great people at CFB Greenwood need to change a few of their processes to adjust to these kinds of situations, sending helicopters 100 kilometres offshore. The nearest airport needs to have the capability to do it.
I will present a quick personal issue from southwest Nova Scotia. A young gentleman who is a fisher just had a terrible accident: 24-year-old Andrew Saulnier was caught up in the engine room. He lost one leg and could possibly lose the other. He is a young guy with a few children. I am going to share this on my Facebook page, not that we should be presenting Facebook page issues here in the House of Commons, but if people want to help out families, a family like Andrew Saulnier's is one that we all should be supporting, and this budget does not.