Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to our motion. I am going to talk a bit about the interim federal health program and then a few other things.
The first point I want to make clearly is that the program creates a two-tiered health system in our country. It has a Cadillac benefits system for failed asylum claimants and a basic system for regular Canadians. That is the design of this system. The costs are already nearing $1 billion a year, and they will be climbing to $1.5 billion within four years. Of course, the Liberals claim the system works. They have all kinds of answers, supposedly, to all the complaints, but I will demonstrate that it does not work.
First of all, on two-tiered health care, in 2025, 300,000 asylum claimants received benefits. Let us get clear on the benefits. There are two kinds.
There are the basic benefits, the things we would all agree people should have. That is coverage for things like emergency room visits, doctor visits, hospital treatments and required surgeries, any kind of emergencies that come up. That is basic health care, the basic health care that all Canadians have. Nobody would argue that people in our country should not have access to that kind of coverage, and Conservatives certainly agree. Provinces do not pay for that, because it is not for permanent residents or citizens, so they can rightly come back to the federal government and ask it to cover the costs, which it does.
The second part is called supplemental benefits. These are benefits that many Canadians do not have. These are for things like, for example, vision care: glasses, contact lenses and getting a new pair of glasses every two years. They are part of supplemental benefits. Dental and drug coverage, ambulance visits, in-home nursing, medical supplies, hearing aids and these kinds of things are also supplemental benefits. They are things that many Canadians do not have and have to pay out of pocket for. Unfortunately, failed asylum claimants get that coverage for free through the program, and it accounts for nearly half of the cost of the program, a significant cost.
I would also bring to the attention of the House the fact that there has been testimony at committee that showed that the program is badly managed. As I said, physicians charge the federal government for this coverage, and they are charging in some cases up to five times what they would normally charge their provincial government for services, because the federal government does not manage the program very well and is willing to pay that extra cost. That shows the poor management happening with the program right now.
Now let me talk about the cost. Four years ago the program cost about $200 million, and right now it is costing about $900 million. It has gone up more than four times in four years. The Parliamentary Budget Officer did a projection for four years from now, and the cost is going to be up to $1.5 billion. That is going to be eight times the cost within an eight-year period. I would say this is an out-of-control program that definitely needs some help and some work to get it back under control.
The Liberals proposed a solution, which they are calling copay. Let me talk about that. The copay they are proposing is four dollars for a prescription. Someone, let us say, getting a $1,500 Ozempic prescription is going to pay four dollars, and the government is going to pay $1,496. For the other supplementary services, the Cadillac services I spoke of before, the copay is going to be 30%. It will reduce the cost a little, but it is still going to be far more than $1 billion a year four years from now. We are kind of splitting hairs on cost. It is still going to be a more than $1-billion program four years from now.
Another way to think about this is that if we take the entire budget for health care, which I think is somewhere in the order of about $55 billion for our country, the money that is given to the provinces for health care, that works out to about $1,275 per Canadian. If we take this line item and put it against how many asylum seekers there are, it works out to about $3,300 per Canadian. On a per capita basis, the government is spending almost three times as much money on this program as it does on benefits for all Canadians. What if the Liberals got the system under control and were able to manage it properly? That is what needs to be done and what I argue is not happening.
Why are there so many refugee claims? Let me talk about legitimate refugees versus bogus refugee claims. We know that legitimate refugees are fleeing war, persecution and violence. There is a government sponsorship process for that. The UNHCR is involved in that process. There is also a private sponsorship method where groups of people can get together and sponsor refugees to come to Canada. Conservatives have no issues with that. These are what people think of when they think about asylum claimants and refugees, and we are a generous country so we want those kinds of benefits extended to people to the extent that we as a country can afford to do that.
When we talk about asylum claimants, it is different. There is no real process for this. This is when people enter Canada either with a permit of some sort or illegally, and then they immediately claim asylum. They say that they are under some sort of persecution and that they fear going back to their country, or something like that, and of course some of those claims are legitimate as well. There are definitely people who arrive in Canada who truly fear going back to their country, and I would have no problem with letting a person like that go through the system and be found to be a legitimate refugee whom, should Canada have the capacity to bring them in, we could bring in.
However, there are also many who take advantage of the system, and we have seen it so many times, where a person comes to our country and is here for a while. Maybe they are a student, or maybe they are working or doing whatever they might be doing, and then something bad happens to them. It could be as simple as not being able to get their paperwork extended and being requested to leave the country, or it could be something worse, such as being convicted of a crime, and then they are actually going to be deported. What do they do? They claim refugee status, claim asylum, and this is where there is a lot of abuse in the program and there a lot of people who take advantage of the generosity of the very bureaucratic system.
The system takes almost four years to go through, with all the different ways that someone can appeal. We have talked about it, as have many other speakers, but someone can have a claim rejected by the IRB, and then there are several avenues of appeal they can take. This is the time period for the people who have been rejected, and they are trying to game the system. They are the ones who are getting the benefits.
The other interesting thing in the whole process is how many of the claims are actually accepted. In Canada right now, we are accepting roughly 80% of refugee claims, which seems like a high number, off the top. I did some looking into peer countries. The parliamentary secretary just talked about G7 countries, and I looked at some of these countries. Germany has an acceptance rate of 59%, versus ours of 80%. Sweden has an acceptance rate of 40%, and Ireland has an acceptance rate of 30%. Therefore, it seems odd to me that we are accepting 80% of refugee claims made in Canada, because that just does not seem to match up with what some of our peer countries are doing.
We definitely have a pull factor for people wanting to come here, because the system is quite easy to game, but another thing that came to our attention this week related to this is something the Immigration and Refugee Board does, called a file review. With a file review, there are certain countries of origin that have been determined to be not worthy of having somebody look at the file, so if someone happens to be an asylum seeker from such a country, they basically get approved automatically by the system, and nobody actually even looks at the file. Nobody talks to that person. The countries on that list are kind of scary to me. They are the ones for which we might want to actually talk to those people just to make sure we are not allowing bad actors to come into our country.
The list of countries includes, for example, Afghanistan, North Korea, Yemen, Pakistan and Iran. That is not in any way to say that everybody coming from those countries is bad. I am saying that when somebody comes to our country from, let us say, Iran, I want a government official to actually interview that person. Is the person a member of the IRGC? Does the person have military history? Is the person escaping their country with the rewards of something that they did unlawfully in their country and coming to Canada to stay here? I want somebody to actually ask those questions and check that out, and that is not happening. That is partly why our acceptance rates are so high in this country.
Is the program worth $1.5 billion? I would suggest it is not. If someone is a phony asylum claimant, if they are a foreign criminal or if they are a Liberal politician, then I guess it is worth that. However, if someone is a regular Canadian, I would say it is not. Let us remember that we do not want a two-tiered health care system in Canada.
The Conservatives have a plan that is about fairness and about focus to protect emergency care but end the extras for rejected claims, reduce the strain on the system and ensure that Canadians get the health care they have earned and paid for.