Bob Mills

[Transportation Safety, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, this past weekend my riding of Red Deer suffered another serious disaster. This one involved rail cars carrying anhydrous ammonia that jumped the tracks near the northwest corner of the city of Red Deer. This past July we had the deadly tornado that swept through the Green Acres campsite at Pine Lake, killing 12.

As a result of the derailment, one man is in serious condition and numerous others have been treated for exposure to the ammonia. We hope and pray for a speedy recovery for those individuals who have taken ill due to this accident. As of last night the evacuation order was dropped and people have been allowed to return to their homes.

I extend special thanks to the emergency services personnel, who have once again proven how valuable they are to the people of the Red Deer constituency. Firefighters, police officers and medical personnel have done an excellent job of bringing this serious situation under control. I must also recognize the many volunteers who have contributed greatly to help make this whole experience a little less stressful for those involved.

[Sports, February 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, for the third consecutive week the Red Deer Rebels of the Major Junior Western Hockey League have been ranked number one in our nation. The Rebels have worked extremely hard to obtain this number one ranking and should be very proud of themselves.

The Rebels solid work ethic starts from the top with their coach, Brent Sutter. Brent and his assistant, Dallas Gaume, have done a fantastic job in bringing out the best of these talented players.

The Red Deer Rebels are an outstanding organization. The hockey club is very active in central Alberta and supports many worthwhile causes. These young people work with the youth in our community and truly are excellent role models for the next generation.

As the member of parliament for Red Deer, I am proud of the Rebels in our community. Obviously the ultimate goal for the Rebels is a trip to the Memorial Cup in Regina this spring.

By continuing their excellent play we are confident they will succeed. They have many best wishes from the entire community for the achievement of this goal.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, obviously the frustration has been well demonstrated. That is why 78% of Canadians say that the system is in crisis. To have the health minister quote a little paragraph today saying that it is not in crisis is shocking. The other opposition members should be attacking a government that would let that happen.

How do we deal with the brain drain? Who cut the seats in universities for training doctors? Who cut the training in specialist programs? I have talked to a number of hospitals and universities. Sixteen universities teach medicine. All of them have said they have had to cut their programs.

The nursing program in the college in the town I come from had 450 applications but only 60 places for training. That is a problem that has come from the federal government. We need to collectively attack the federal government to fix that problem. The system is broken. We have a two tier health care system or maybe, as most professionals would say, a five or six or ten tier system. That is what we should be focusing on. That is the frustration of Canadians.

I repeat that there will be frustration in the House if the motion on which we will be voting does not receive 100% support. The system is in crisis. The system is not sustainable. Status quo is not an option. If anybody in the House says that it is not true, he or she is saying that the system is not in crisis, that the system is sustainable and that status quo is all right. Those members will hide behind the Canada Health Act and say it is wonderful. They will say “Tommy, you did it for us”, but that was in the sixties.

We have to get into the 21st century. We have to do it collectively and all come up with the answers. As mentioned by the whip of the Canadian Alliance, the cry is coming from everybody.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned to the hon. member earlier, she should not have written those questions before she heard the speech. The problem is that they were prepared this morning. Again it is partisan politics. It is a perfect example of why there are so many turf wars.

We have to put partisan politics aside. Many members in the House today, in fact pretty well all of them, dealt with the issue of health care. They came up with what they thought should be examined and what the solutions might be.

I encourage the member to take a look at our health care task force report. I encourage her to sit down with me and go through it point by point. We only have 20 minutes to talk about it in the House. I understand her frustration.

Bill 11 is no different from what Mr. Romanow did yesterday. He said he was frustrated. Basically he took Saskatchewan party's idea and said that we needed a study because the feds were showing no leadership. Mr. Klein was desperate and thought we must try something new. We support his going ahead with bill 11 as a pilot project to see if it works. If it does not work, it could be scrapped. If it does work, it could be implemented across the country. If Mr. Romanow comes up with some weird idea, he could try it to see if it works. If it does, he could use it.

That is what we have to do. We need an open mind, not a closed mind, not a mind stuck in the sixties as many of the NDP and CCF policies are.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to speak to the amendment. I thank the many members who have spoken to the motion today.

Many members have made somewhat the same points. The system does need a lot help. I am disappointed that the health minister would choose to say that he would not support the motion. Therefore I guess he is saying that he does not believe the system is in crisis, that he believes the status quo is an option and that he thinks the system is sustainable. Obviously by opposing the motion he is saying those things. I am rather surprised that all members of the House could not agree that this is a non-partisan issue. It is an issue that we should be looking at because 78% of Canadians are saying that is their number one issue.

In summarizing what we have heard today, basically there are problems between the federal and provincial ministers talking to each other. We have heard about some of the turf wars that go on, whether it is between governments, between various professions or something much smaller at a very local level. We have heard about the lack of long term funding, the sustainability of that funding, and a major disagreement as to who is funding what and how much.

We have also heard from members that we are spending an adequate amount comparable to many of the OECD countries. We have had comparisons to some of them. We must recognize that the World Health Organization has said that we are falling in terms of our position in the world on health care. The OECD puts us in the bottom third for a great many areas within health care delivery.

We have heard a great deal of rhetoric and promises. We have not heard very many solutions or calls to action. We have not heard what we will do about the brain drain, technology, demographics and increasing drug costs. We really have not addressed a key factor, the extremely growing cost of health care.

Health Canada today says that the costs will increase at 3% a year for the foreseeable future. With our present spending of $86 billion on health care, by the year 2020 that figure will be $160 billion. That is our total budget of today. We are saying in some 20 years that will be the figure for health care alone. How will we deal with that? How will we come up with some solutions?

Let me try to put some of them on the table today. Obviously we do not have all the answers, but we are saying that someone had better start looking at them. We are saying it should be non-partisan. We are saying it should be for Canadians. Canadians do not care whether it is federal or provincial. They do not care whether it is one party or another party. They care about a system which 78% of them agree is broken.

Let us look at the solutions. I will try to summarize them. I remind members of the House that the former Reform Party had a task force report on health care entitled “New Directions: Setting the Course for Canada Health Care in the 21st Century”. I recommend that people read it. It has been condensed down to about 90 pages. It set some targets and goals. I certainly wish members of the House would quote it as opposed to quoting some of the other fictitious statements we have heard here.

To emphasize what I am talking about, our party would put forward to the House a patient centred, results based health care system. In a patient centred system the patient is number one. What helps the patient? What problems is the patient having? It is not the systems, not the government, not the various organizations, but the patient. The patient is number one. Then we need to look at the results. What are we achieving? We do not need to keep protecting the Canada Health Act and hiding behind it. We need to ask whether it is getting the results for the patient.

Let me start with two recommendations. The first one is to promote federal-provincial co-operation. How will we do that? We could go back in history and obviously say that in the sixties we came up with a formula where the federal government would provide 50% and the provincial government would provide 50%. Then we worked up to another system where we used cash and tax points. I do not think I need to go through all those figures. Then of course by 1995 we got to the CHST.

If we look at the 1993 figures, the federal government was transferring $18.8 billion. In 1998 it went to a low of $12.5 billion. Now it has been raised back to $15.5 billion. If we take all that into consideration, no matter how we do the math, had we stayed with the 1993 figures we are $24 billion short of what we would have been had we kept it at the 1993 figures.

No matter how the government twirls that around and hides that, those are facts that the provinces have recognized and identified. It does not matter whether it is Mr. Romanow's government, Mr. Harris' government or Mr. Tobin's government, they are all telling the federal government the same thing. We have to stop antagonizing the provinces. I certainly commend Mr. Romanow who said, I suppose in frustration, that he wanted to start a national study on this and at least hopefully get the ball rolling.

The reality is that people do not care about whether the jurisdiction is provincial or federal. They want it fixed. The need is obvious. The problems are obvious.

What about the solution to this federal-provincial co-operation? Let me put five things forward for consideration.

First, we believe as Mr. Romanow does, that we need a health care advisory board, a group made up of federal and provincial citizens and of course health care workers. We need to have that advisory group to look at the situation immediately. The federal government should be taking the leadership role, not the provinces.

Second, we need to restore long term stable funding to help federal-provincial co-operation. We cannot go to the table with the provinces and say, “We are not giving any more money”. We do not have to say how much we are giving them but we need to put all the cards on the table and talk about the money issue.

Third, we need to have an independent auditing of the health care system. It needs to be audited. It cannot simply have money thrown at it and no one knows what anything costs. I have visited many hospitals in the last three months and I keep asking, “What does that cost? What would that cost? What would it cost if we did this?” No one seems to know.

The health minister talked about the U.S. system and its administration and that all the costs are known. I am not saying that is what we want. I am saying we need to know. We need some accounting. We need to know what things cost.

Fourth, we need to learn about the innovations in other places. I was very fortunate to visit the Swiss health care system a few weeks ago. I was rather shocked at what I found. I was shocked that when a gentleman with heart pains came to the emergency ward he was immediately met by two cardiovascular surgeons, two doctors and two trained nurses. There were eight MRIs and he was in an intensive care unit within six minutes. All of his medical history was on a card. They knew exactly what medications he was on and what treatments he had had. Now that is technology. That man's life may well have been saved because of those improvements in that health care system.

We need to learn from those innovations. We need to look at what Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and other countries are doing. Please, Mr. Speaker, advise the members on the other side to stop talking about the U.S. health care system as the only example. There are many other much better health care systems we should be looking at that are spending the same amount of money that we are. Switzerland spends 10.2% of GDP. We spend 9.8%. That is awfully close for those two different health care systems. We need to look at that.

Fifth, I would recommend that we appoint a health care auditor. He should be empowered by the Canada Health Act to standardize, co-operate and modernize the Canada Health Act. He should have that kind of authority. It is important to Canadians so that should be in place.

Those are concrete recommendations. There is a great deal of detail that can go with those which we will be providing.

We need to modernize the Canada Health Act. That is a complex issue which I can only touch on in the minutes I have left. We oppose a two tier American style health care system, one for the rich and one for the poor. Nobody wants it and nobody is talking about it or suggesting it. It certainly is not this party's position. There, it is said. I could repeat it three or four more times, but I am sure the crowd across the way still will not understand it.

I will state our position on the Canada Health Act. We believe in the tenets of the Canada Health Act, but we are saying it is not working. It needs to be modernized. I have heard many people say that in the House. I have heard many provincial health ministers say that.

The system is not accessible the way it is today. Some 200,000 people are on waiting lists. A lady in my riding wrote me a letter saying she had just come from her doctor and she needed to see a specialist and her appointment with the specialist was scheduled for April 11, 2001. That is not accessibility. That is a system that is broken, that is not working, that is in crisis.

We could talk about the shortage of MRIs and other technology. The average age of specialists is 59. It takes 14 years to train them. We train 1,600 doctors and some years 800 leave. We cut the number of spaces available for training doctors. We need 2,200 doctors just to replace what the system is going to require. It is not an accessible system. We need to fix these things. We need to fix the brain drain. We need to get the technology. We need to be prepared for what we are going to be facing in the years to come.

It is not a portable system and many have talked about that, whether a person is in rural Canada or whether they need specialized treatment or whether they are in Quebec. I have asked doctors in hospitals here about patients from Quebec. They told me that they encourage them to pay first and then to go back and fight with their government to get the money. That is not a portable system. That is not acceptable.

Is the system universal? In Alberta there are 333 positions open for rural doctors right now. It is certainly not very universal. The presence of specialists is not very universal, as I have touched on.

Is the system comprehensive? There are a number of delisted items from health care. We have a real problem with a comprehensive health care system. We are suggesting again that we must fix it.

Home care is another major issue. My mother is in Saskatchewan and is presently having serious problems. That province was a founder of health care and if that is how people are treated, it is inhumane and very troubling. We need to look at the home care and palliative care issues and see what we can do. The Senate just reported what it thinks about Canada's palliative care system and the report card was pretty dismal.

Let me talk about public administration. It is fine to say that the system is fine the way it is, but we need to look at how we administer health care. We have to open that up. We have to look at the options. I mentioned the Swiss system and I do not have time to go into that. This summer I intend to visit other systems and look at how they work.

We agree with the principles contained in the Canada Health Act, but they are not working. There is not a Canadian who is not touched by that. What are the solutions? Let me summarize them quickly.

One solution is a long term stable funding commitment with a minimum term of five years. We must work out that deal collectively with the provinces.

We must develop technology so that we enter the 21st century and not stay in the 1960s where we seem to be mired. I have talked about that. There is a surgeon who did a heart operation in New York and the patient was in Idaho. A robot did the surgery. The surgeon is able to do three of those a day just by running that equipment.

On education I have mentioned what we need to do in terms of the financial commitment to fix that problem. It is not the only answer but we must come to the table with some dollars.

We need to show leadership to modernize the Canada Health Act, to demonstrate co-operation between the federal and provincial governments. The health minister talks about it but then he goes out and does something dumb which makes the provinces that much madder. That will not fix the Canada Health Act and it will not fix what Canadians want fixed.

We need a health care auditor. As I said, we need independent auditing to make sure the provinces are abiding by the Canada Health Act and to make sure patients are not abusing the health care system. We need to know what things cost if we are to have a health care system like this.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel; we can learn from others. Many innovative things are happening in Sweden where the system now is 50% public, 50% private. I do not know if that is the way we should go, but we need to look at it. There are various insurance options. We need to look at those. We need to have open minds and not live with a 1960s socialized state run health care system such as those in North Korea and Cuba. We have to move out of that mindset.

We need to modernize the whole system. We need patient centred health care. We need to be prepared to look at medical savings accounts and patient guarantees. We have to fix the waiting list problem. We need to be prepared to look at new technology and decide if that is a solution to the problems we face. Above all, we need to work with the provinces and not work against them. We have to stop the drive-by smears. We have to stop the $2 million advertising campaign against the provinces. We have to stop antagonizing them.

In conclusion, the Canadian Alliance stands for fiscal responsibility. Members know that. We have developed our principles there but I want to say in the House that we have a social conscience. There are no hidden ghosts, as my colleague from the health committee might intimate. There are no ghosts. There is no hidden agenda. We believe in a patient centred, results based health care system instead of the Liberal two tier, turf dominated, non-sustainable, deteriorating health care system. Remember that we spend the fourth most of the industrialized countries and we are in the bottom third in terms of rating our health care system.

As we develop this policy collectively with the help of other Canadians, with the help of the provinces, we must remember that this patient centred health care system will result in something that is sustainable for Canadians. It shocks me that the government or any member in the House would not support that kind of co-operative policy to do what is best for health care for Canadians.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I appreciated a lot of what the deputy critic said about health care, and he said it so well.

Does the deputy critic have the same interpretation as I do concerning the fact that the Minister of Health got up today and said that he was going to oppose this motion. The motion says that health care is not sustainable in its present form, the status quo is not an option and that the health care system is in crisis.

By saying he is opposed, is he in fact saying that the status quo is just fine, that it is sustainable and that there is in fact no crisis? It seems to me that is what he is saying, or what the Liberal members across, who will be opposing the motion, will be saying with their vote. They should really think about their vote if that is the message that they are sending today.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, we heard a lot of motherhood, a lot of status quo and a lot of comparison to the U.S. system which no Canadian wants. Why even talk about it? It keeps coming out.

The real question is that today we spend $86 billion in public money in total on health care. The projections of Health Canada are that it will increase at 3%. That means that by the year 2020 we will be spending $160 billion on health care.

We want the new technology. We want the new medications. We want all that. The Premier of Newfoundland says he is already spending 42% of his budget on health care. Other provinces say they are spending 30% of their budgets on health care. What is the right amount to be spent on health care? If we are to spend $160 billion, what about all the other things government has to do?

The minister talked about the system not being in crisis, but 78% of Canadians say that the system is in crisis. The people are saying that. The only people who do seem to be hearing it are the politicians.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, obviously in a leadership race, as he knows and everyone in the House knows, leadership candidates can pretty much say what they want. The point is what happens here. What the party says, what the shadow cabinet looks at and what caucus looks at is what is party policy.

I would remind the member that there was a candidate in the race for the leadership of his party, Mr. Orchard, who obviously was against free trade and against a lot of the things which that party introduced and stood for. I think that says it all.

Obviously we will wait until June 24 to see what the leadership stands for.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I became the critic on January 1. We are in the middle of a leadership race. I can assure the House that our web page will be full of health care solutions as we proceed in this process.

The hon. member's question is whether we should put more money in. The point is that we spend about the fourth most of the industrialized countries on health care and we are in the bottom third in terms of our ratings. We are 23rd in the area of technology and so on. If we are in the bottom third with the fourth best investment, money is obviously not the only answer.

It is an answer to return some of the funding to go to the table with the provinces so they will negotiate. We need that money on the table, but that is not the key to solving this problem of health care. I think Canadians know that. I think people in the health industry know that. I think the provincial health ministers know that.

It is a matter of co-operation with them, and coming to the table with an open slate. That is the point that has to be made and that is the point we will continue to make. We are in the process of consulting with Canadians. We intend to do that extensively through the fall. At that point, if the government is not asking the necessary questions of Canadians, we will do that for the government.

[Supply, June 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to have moved this motion today. I intend to try to share some of what Canadians have been saying about the health care system and to put forward some of the solutions we would like Canadians to look at.

We are opposed to a two tier, U.S. for profit health care system. Through the course of the day members of my party and I will demonstrate exactly what we see as the future for health care and the direction it might go.

It is fair to say that Canadians are extremely concerned about their health care system. I will quote from some recent articles that have appeared in newspapers right across the country. One headline read “Gloom deepens about health care, new polls show”. Some 78% of Canadians think the health care system in their province is in crisis and 75% believe the system currently is facing a major crisis around funding. So the headlines go: “Mediocre health care called brain drain factor”.

All kinds of other health care shocks are part of the system. We hear about over 1,000 people in Quebec on waiting lists for heart surgery. Cancer patients are waiting sometimes up to three months before they can get any treatment.

I will be sharing my time with the member for Fraser Valley. I will come back after that to carry on with some of the solutions I propose for the health care system.

What is wrong with this system? If we take a broad view we find there are many turf wars. There are turf wars between the federal and provincial governments. Things are happening within the system such as the so-called driveby smears that are occurring. There is a $1.8 million ad campaign against the Ontario government. There is a real ongoing battle between the federal and the provincial governments.

Canadians do not care who fixes the health system. They want Canadians to fix the health care system, both provincially and federally.

We also have system centred health care. We are always concerned about the system and seldom seem to talk about the patient. We do not talk about what is best for patients, be they senior citizens who are having difficulties finding a place to go for their declining years or people with impending heart surgery to save their lives. We do not talk about individual people. We always talk about the system and saving the system. That is wrong. We have to change that focus.

As well we have to take a look at a state run, socialized type of system. Maybe it works in North Korea and in Cuba, but I am not sure it works in modern Canada. We also have to look at doctor and nurse shortages. We have to look at all groups that are concerned about health care. We have to end the turf wars. We have to get down to a patient centred focus where health care should be.

We have to talk about funding. Obviously we can go back in history to the sixties when a 50:50 agreement was made by the provinces and the federal government. The federal government obviously has different responsibilities from those of the provinces but they agreed to a common funding. In 1977 it was agreed to change the way the funding occurred from strictly dollars to a dollar and tax points system. We could go into great depth and detail about how it works, but I do not think that is the point of today's debate.

In 1995 the government again changed the system and the method of funding to the CHST grants involving a block of money. We really lost control of what was happening and how the system was being monitored. The auditing of the system is just not there. This block of money is transferred. We do not know how provinces are using it or what they are using it for. No one seems to know what anything costs.

We should address the fact that in 1993 the amount of money being transferred by the federal government was $18.8 billion. By 1998 it had declined to $12.5 billion or close to a 40% cut in funding by the federal government. Since then it has increased to $14.5 billion this year and $15.5 billion next year. If we add each year's cut in funding from the 1993 levels, the bottom line is that today's total would be a cut of about $24 billion in federal funding. That is the point that the Ontario government is trying to make to the health minister and which the health minister seems to fail to understand.

Instead we enter into a kind of shell game with the Prime Minister saying that he is transferring more money than ever before. Even in Las Vegas this sort of shell game would not be accepted by the players in that city. What is happening with the funding? The federal government has definitely cut the funding and the provinces are saying it must at least return it to 1993 levels. To this point we have no response. Nothing has happened.

We need to look at the rating of our health care system. We need to look at a study done by the OECD on the 29 industrialized countries of the world. We find that we spend somewhere between the fourth and fifth most on health care of those industrialized countries. We spend 9.2% to 9.8% of our GDP on health care. That is similar to most of those other top industrialized countries.

The problem is that in many other areas we are in the bottom third of the rating of those countries in terms of the delivery of service. If we spend the fourth most and we are the 23rd best, there is obviously something wrong. It is not to point fingers or to blame anyone; it is a matter of looking at what is wrong and why it is happening.

As well, the World Health Organization is coming out with a report, which we have seen parts of already. On June 21 that report will be made public. Again, there will be an evaluation of the 181 countries in the World Health Organization. In the report, on the area of life expectancy, it indicates that we have dropped from second to twelfth.

The decline of Canada and Canada's health care system is of major concern to Canadians. That is why 78% of Canadians say that their health care system is in crisis. That is why they are asking and demanding that Canadian politicians, provincial and federal, look at health care, identify what is wrong and fix the system.

We have heard a lot of talk in the House about how the government cares about health care. However, we really have not seen very much. We pretty much have a white page of solutions coming from the government. It is not a white paper; it is just a white blank page as far as the solutions that the government is putting forward.

I could go on and talk about education, the brain drain, the lack of technology and the huge problems we have. I had the occasion to tour a Swiss hospital recently. I could not believe the difference between the Swiss hospital and some of the hospitals I have toured in Canada. The emergency room crisis, the aging population and the rising drug costs are all things that Canadians expect us to deal with.

I want to tempt you, Mr. Speaker, to be here a little later in the day when I will talk about the solutions to health care. I will also tempt the health minister to be here as well to hear the proposals from the Canadian Alliance as to what we should do with the provinces to fix the health care system.

Because my time is up, I will turn it over to the House leader for the official opposition.