Reg Alcock

[Supply, April 27th, 1995]

I am pleased that the members recognize that I can read.

I would like to balance what members opposite talked so strongly about, of putting greater control in the hands of the province, against a statement made not too long ago by another Reform member in the human resources committee. The statement made was: "Well, I come from a have province. We contribute money to Confederation. Should we not be able to dictate the kinds of services those people in the poor provinces get?" At the root of my feelings about this debate is what it says about us as a country.

We made a decision a long time ago that we were going to provide health care. We were going to see that every person no matter where they lived in the country, no matter what their income level, would be entitled to basic health care. We made that decision as a country. We have followed through on that promise.

Reform members talk so loudly about supporting the wishes of their constituents. There is no other service government delivers that the people value as much as their health care system.

The Reform Party reminds me of the old story about the doctor whose only answer to a query was: "Take two aspirins and call me in the morning". On every policy issue that is debated its members say one thing: "We have a deficit. We do not have the money for it so we have to cut somewhere. We have to get out of it". It strikes me that a party that has been around here for a while which has some intelligent, thoughtful people in it, could think a little harder about what they are really saying.

We spend between 4 and 4.5 per cent of the federal budget on health care. In doing so, we buy ourselves one of the finest health care systems in the world. This is the point of attack

Reformers have chosen to solve the deficit problem. It is not funny. It is tragic that they would attack a service that is so valuable to so many people who have so few options.

It is fine to talk about the wealthy individual who can walk into any place in the world and buy what he or she needs. However we also have to think about the person who cannot do that. It is something that has been a part of our values for all my working life, and hopefully will be for all my life.

There is another aspect to this. I think we have to ask the Reform Party to be a little more intellectually honest. In the proposal put forward it talks about the fall from 50 per cent to 23 per cent. I suppose it is done to heighten the fears it might engender in people or to heighten the arguments that can be made about the role of the federal government and what the federal government has or has not done. However, that is simply not true. It is false information, which the party has put on the record in order to strengthen its debate.

The fact is that the first number refers to the federal government's share of spending on hospital and physician services, our contribution to medicare. The second number refers to the federal share of total health spending, things like non-prescription drugs, cough drops, et cetera. The Reform Party knows this, and its researchers should know this, and to bring it forward simply discredits the debate it wishes to have.

Reform members talk about creating a list of services, which presumably some bureaucrats in Ottawa would manage, having consulted with doctors, and they would tell us what medical services we could have and what medical services we could not have.

The Reform Party has been accused on occasion of looking south for its policy initiatives. I do not want to spend all of my time walking through that particular model, but I would like to note a couple of things.

I had a recent experience in the United States. I lived there for a few years. I met a man in Los Angeles, quite a wealthy man, who had a very serious cancer of the jaw. He received very good medical service. Following a technique that is available here in Canada, they replaced his jawbone with a piece of bone taken from his thigh. It was marvellous. It was truly a wonderful piece of work.

He walked out of that hospital and was told that was it, his insurance was now cancelled. Despite the fact that he is wealthy and despite the fact that he has the resources, he cannot at any price buy service. In the system the Reform Party promotes, he cannot buy service for the rest of his life.

I would like to give another example. This happened to my nephew, who lives in Los Angeles. He drove to another state on a vacation and he fell and cut the palm of his hand on a piece of glass. He cut a tendon, so it was a little more serious than just a cut in his hand. He was rushed to the local hospital and they looked at it and put a compress on it and said: "Your insurance only covers this immediate service. To get the tendon repaired you have to go back to a health jurisdiction that your insurance respects". He had to drive some 500 miles to get a fairly serious repair. He could have lost the function of his finger.

When we talk about letting the provinces decide and when we talk about letting individual hospitals decide, are we not talking about a system that says that a person may not be able to get service because the level of coverage in their province does not cover them for all of those things? Is that not exactly the kind of divisive force that the Reform Party promotes when it talks about the have provinces being able to dictate the level of services in the have not provinces? I reject that.

Frankly, in this country we have a very serious problem. We are seeing an increasing polarization between those who are well to do, who can take care of themselves and live a comfortable life, and those who are not so fortunate. We are fast building a community not unlike those we see around large cities in the U.S., walled cities, walled communities, which have a wall built around them to keep the bad folks out. We are building a society that is less inclusive, less caring, less Canadian than the one I believe in. The Reform Party needs to consider very carefully what it is promoting when it talks about the destruction of our health care system.

One of the discussions the Reform Party brought forward in its motion is the idea that we would have a matrix of services or a list of services. It is interesting that the provinces and the federal government do not want to impose a list of services. They do not want it because they want to do what the member for Beaver River said in her closing remarks: they want the decisions about care to be decided between the doctor and the person who needs the care. The federal government believes that. It is enshrined in the principles. The provinces also want that.

The member who spoke just before the member for Beaver River made a comment about universality. It is odd to me that the Reform Party finds universality such a difficult concept to understand. All universality means is that everyone has access. If they do not want to have universality, as they have been stating, despite the agreement, who are they going to exclude? If they are not going to have universality, who then is outside of that universal range?

[Supply, April 27th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I was interested in the last few remarks made by the member opposite when she said: "Let the doctors decide. Let the physicians decide. Let the people who are responsible for delivering the care decide".

That is exactly what we do. That is exactly what the Canada Health Act does. Her proposal would put a bureaucrat in their place. There would be a schedule or a list decided by someone other than the physician, someone other than the person who is providing the care. That is one reason why we do not support the proposal that party brought forward today.

I want to step back a little bit and look at exactly what the Reform Party is saying today. The members sat down, thought this out and put it into their political planning that they would have this debate today. They stood up and put forward a motion which states:

That this House recognize that since the inception of our national health care system the federal share of funding for health care in Canada has fallen from 50 per cent to 23 per cent and therefore the House urges the government to consult with the provinces and other stakeholders to determine core services to be completely funded by the federal and provincial governments and non-core services where private insurance and the benefactors of the services might play a supplementary role.

[Supply, April 4th, 1995]

I am with you.

[Hate Literature, April 3rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Solicitor General.

Whether it be paper mail or electronic mail, hate mail is still hate mail. The availability of hate propaganda on the Internet is a matter of grave concern for many Canadians.

Can the Solicitor General inform the House on what is being done by the government to address the issue of the increasing availability of hate literature on the Internet?

[Land Mines, March 30th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to join with the member for Brant in drawing to the House's attention the issue of land mines.

The International Red Cross estimates that every 15 minutes someone is killed or maimed by a land mine. Before question period ends today three more people will become innocent victims.

In our world there is no place for such indiscriminate, anti-personnel weapons. Every year some 10,000 people are killed by these devices and many more are injured. There are an estimated 65 million to 110 million uncleared land mines in the world and an additional 10 million to 30 million new land mines being produced every year.

I am proud to say that Canada does not take part in the deployment of these devices and that the government has endorsed the UN's convention on inhumane weapons.

I sincerely hope that during the United Nations review conference in June the government will strengthen Canada's position and place a complete moratorium on the deployment of these weapons.

Let us not forget that today's theatre of conflict is tomorrow's farmland or refugee camp. Innocent men, women and children

are dying. Since 1975 land mines have claimed an estimated one million victims, mostly in the developing world.

Let us help bring an end to this war on the world's poor.

[National Curling Championships, March 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, every day is a wonderful day to be from Manitoba and today is no exception. Yesterday, Manitoba completed a clean sweep of all national curling championships.

Our junior rinks skipped by Chris Galbraith and Kelly MacKenzie are men's and women's junior champions. Connie Laliberte from my home club won the Scott Tournament of Hearts. Yesterday, the team of Kerry Burtnyk, Jeff Ryan, Rob Meakin, Keith Fenton and Denis Fillion won the Labatt Brier.

I know that all members of this House wish they were from Manitoba. I know they will all join me in wishing Kerry's team the very best of luck in the World Curling Championships to be held in Brandon, Manitoba.

[Government Organization Act (Federal Agencies), February 8th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have heard some talk today from both of the speakers of the Reform Party on this bill about bold new thinking, new vision, a new way of doing business and yet all I hear is very old political rhetoric. I would like to ask the member in all seriousness what he feels is served by coming into the House and talking about the long and sterile career of a member of the House or denigrating the person. It is one thing to come forward and raise a legitimate concern about an individual who may be misperforming his or her task or about a policy decision of the government. But it is another to come forward as members of his party have done today and, as some might call it, slander other Canadians, without a scintilla of evidence, without any proof, in fact standing up and admitting that they had not bothered to check the qualifications, but of course they were unqualified.

The question I would like to ask is in the business of good government, how is a bold new vision served by that kind of tactic?

[Government Organization Act (Federal Agencies), February 8th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, that is fine.

[Immigration Act, October 31st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I would remind members that I sat and listened very carefully to the member for Simcoe Centre. I would simply ask that they allow me to do the same. I realize they might be a little afraid to have this kind of talk. They certainly do not appear to understand it.

The fact is that daily we in this Chamber confront a great many very difficult issues. Listening to the members opposite one would think that every adolescent was committing crimes when we know that many of our programs for young people have been very effective. In fact, we know that the majority of young people are living responsible lives, but we do not hear that from across the floor.

We do not hear about the successes in aboriginal communities. We hear about the failures. We do not hear about the successes in immigration, or the successes in multiculturalism, or the successes and the strengths that are given to this country through diversity. We hear about the problems.

Those members do a great disservice to their own constituencies. They do a great disservice to the people of this country when they simply pander to the feeling that somehow we have become better by hating or rejecting or excluding people.

I had an experience some years ago. I was talking with a woman, a professional colleague who is a psychologist. In the middle of the conversation she broke down. She shared with me that she had AIDS. She did not have AIDS, but was actually HIV positive. Her husband was a hemophiliac. He got AIDS through a tainted blood supply and transmitted it to her. She now has full blown AIDS and will no doubt not be with us soon.

That is a terrifying prospect, but when we look at that we know that AIDS is not as virulent or as rampant or as contagious a disease as some people believe. Yes, it is transmittable. There are significant health risks. We should examine those risks. That is a fact and yes, we do. Yet people are so sensitive to this disease, so concerned about it, that they wave it as a banner in front of everybody who wants to be terrified by it or every homophobic individual in the country. All they do is victimize the people who are dealing with a tragedy in their lives.

I urge members to think about that when they bring forward resolutions to the House. There is a a screening process. There is medical examination of immigrants. The government reviews those regularly. We acted in this House some years ago to stop putting categorical lists in place because it categorically discriminated against people. There are policies in place that call for qualified medical personnel to examine people and make decisions about their medical admissibility. It is passing strange to me that the members opposite choose HIV as the one to mount their fight on. They need to examine very carefully their motives for entering into this debate.

[Immigration Act, October 31st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I want to take the time I have available to talk about something which has been causing me increasing concern as I have listened to the debates that have been proffered by members of the Reform Party.

We heard Reform Party members talk over and over again about the need to represent the interests of what they call real Canadians or ordinary Canadians, how they as members of Parliament have a duty and a responsibility to assess opinion from their constituents and to bring that forward to public view and discuss those issues that are important to the people they

represent. I agree with that. That is a fundamental role each and every one of us has when we get elected and come to this House.

We have a second role. We sit in a very privileged position. We sit in the middle of an information flow and have access to resources, information and knowledge that few Canadians have. That imposes a burden upon us, a responsibility to educate and not to simply pander to those things that are of momentary or immediate concern. We must evaluate issues. We must examine them. We must research them. We must come forward to this Chamber with debates and arguments that are based on fact and some sort of presentation of a solution that will improve the lives of people.

To simply victimize groups for cheap short term headlines is irresponsible. Unfortunately that is what I see in this. It is very easy. There are many people in the community who are scared to death of AIDS. It is a terrifying prospect. Surely we who have access to the experts and access to the information can take the time to learn about the issue, can take the time to learn about the work that is being done and bring forward responsible decisions not to inflame that fear.

We have heard it over and over again: youth crime is out of control; immigrants are a drain on society; aboriginals are lazy. That is what we are getting day after day.

The member for Simcoe Centre made a comment about pandering. If there is pandering going on, it is the Reform Party pandering to every nasty instinct that people have and doing nothing to try to advance a different view of this country.