Mr. Speaker, Canada's health care system is broken.
There are 6.5 million Canadians who do not have access to a family doctor. We are short at least 23,000 doctors and 60,000 registered nurses. Emergency rooms are closing across the country. Health care workers are burnt out from millions of hours of overtime. Canadians are literally dying while waiting for care.
Canada's health care system is broken, and instead of repairing the cracks, the Liberals took a hammer to the glass. I am going to warn Canadians that health care in Canada is only going to get worse under the government. Mark my words.
The Liberals are reducing the capacity of doctors and nurses, while at the same time increasing the demand for care. Let us start with capacity. According to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, there are at least 13,000 internationally trained physicians already in Canada who are not working as doctors. According to the health minister's own department, there are 80,000 internationally trained health care professionals in Canada right now who are not working in their field.
Let us think about that. Tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and specialists are here, trained, qualified and ready to serve, but they have been shut out by a wall of bureaucracy. The reason is simple. Government gatekeepers and licensing bodies are blocking these qualified professionals from getting their licences.
The immigration department fast-tracks international doctors and nurses into this country but then abandons them when they arrive. The Liberals have failed to establish a national competency standard to recognize their credentials, so they get stuck, trapped between provincial regulators and federal inaction. As a result, we have doctors driving taxis and working in factories, while hospitals close emergency rooms and patients die waiting for care.
The government sold these professionals a false bill of goods, and Canadians are paying the price. This bottleneck is only getting worse because the Liberals keep adding more people into a broken system without helping the people who are already here.
Another major barrier is that a doctor licensed in one province cannot automatically work in another province. Let us think about that. A doctor who is fully licensed in one province cannot simply move to another and start working without mountains of paperwork, costs and months of delay. If the federal government truly believed in one Canada economy, it would have introduced a national licence for doctors and nurses, allowing them to work anywhere in the country.
Earlier this month, Canadians were briefly optimistic when the health minister told The Globe and Mail that she planned to introduced legislation to remove interprovincial barriers for health professionals, but that hope was short-lived. Within hours, her office reversed course, claiming the minister misunderstood the question. The minister seems to misunderstand a lot of questions when it comes to the health care system.
Another issue is the shortage of residency training spots in Canada. Every year, hundreds of Canadians graduate medical schools abroad, but they cannot get a residency placement in their own country. Why? It is because the federal immigration minister keeps issuing work permits to foreign-sponsored medical trainees, people who come here from foreign countries to train in our hospitals, only to return home afterward.
Countries around the world send their citizens to Canadian hospitals for training. In fact, according to data from the Canadian Post-M.D. Education Registry, Saudi Arabia alone sent over 1,000 trainees to Canada last year. Almost all of them will never work a single day in Canada after their training is complete.
Meanwhile, Canadian citizens who studied medicine overseas, often because there were not enough medical school seats in Canada, are told there is no capacity for them. Why is the federal immigration minister issuing work permits for Saudi students to train in our hospitals, when there are not enough training spots for Canadians?
The Liberals like to claim that record immigration levels will somehow fix our health care system, but that is not what is happening. Thousands of qualified, foreign-trained doctors are already here and cannot work. Thousands of Canadian citizens who trained abroad cannot get trained. We cannot fix a traffic jam by adding more cars to the road, and that is exactly what the Liberals are doing.
Let us now look at the other side of the equation, which is demand. This year alone, the Liberals plan to allow 395,000 new permanent residents and 673,000 non-permanent residents into Canada. That is over a million people added to a health care system that already cannot keep up. It does not take an economist to understand that adding a record number of people to our country will have an impact on health care.
Here is the real scandal. According to Health Canada, the Liberals have done no analysis, none whatsoever, on the impact that record immigration levels will have on our health care system. Even the health minister admitted this insanity when she said, “Right now, there's no alignment on immigration and the need for doctors”.
To make matters worse, Canadians were outraged to learn that the immigration department has been advertising Canada's free health care around the world as a selling point to attract more newcomers. Canada is not a walk-in clinic for the rest of the world. Compassion must consider capacity.
That brings me to the legislation before us, Bill C-239. The Liberals claim that the bill would improve accountability in health care, but if we read it, there is no accountability for results. There is nothing in Bill C-239 that would require provinces to increase access to family doctors, reduce emergency wait times or improve diagnostic services. What it does do is create another bureaucratic framework that provinces must follow or risk losing their federal health transfers. In other words, it is more red tape.
The bill would require provinces to produce reports, frameworks and performance summaries, but nothing that would actually help a single patient see a doctor faster. If provinces do not comply with Ottawa's new paperwork, they could lose health care funding.
Here is the confusing part. Paragraph 13(a) of the Canada Health Act already requires provinces to provide health data to the federal Minister of Health to qualify for transfers. Provincial and territorial governments also submit health care data to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, also known as CIHI.
What does Bill C-239 really accomplish? The answer is nothing. I was not surprised to learn that the provinces were not consulted on the legislation, because if they were, I am confident that they would have opposed it. Conservatives believe that the way to fix health care is not by creating more bureaucracy but by removing the barriers that prevent qualified medical professionals from working. We believe that the government should establish a blue seal national licensing standard. This would be a competency-based standard to recognize qualified doctors, nurses and other health care professionals all across Canada.
Conservatives also believe that immigration policy must be linked to health care system capacity. It is unfair to the Canadians who are waiting in hospital hallways for care, and it is unfair to the newcomers who were sold a false bill of goods. The Liberals should be focused on getting more doctors and nurses licensed, opening more residency positions for Canadians who studied abroad and reducing red tape, not expanding it. This is how we fix Canada's broken health care system.