Lorne Nystrom

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

No, no.

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that people have to do this. The money is in the federal treasury. There should be more money put into transfers from the federal government. The surplus is now $11 billion more than it was thought to be only a few months ago. The federal government should be putting up its fair share of the money. If that were to happen, then private fundraising would not be required.

I also say to the member that Saskatchewan is one of the few provinces which backfilled the drop in federal contributions dollar for dollar. That is actually quite a feat for a small province which does not have a big treasury like Alberta or Ontario.

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

The member across the way is now trying to interject. He is saying that it is untrue. It is 12 cents or 13 cents on the dollar, depending on the province. Those are well documented facts. The only people who dispute them are some Liberal members of the House of Commons. If we look at Statistics Canada, that is the kind of information we get.

The other things we are talking about are home care and pharmacare, as well as amending the Canada Health Act to make sure that bill 11 in Alberta does not pass without the Government of Alberta being penalized. Those are three or four of the points that we are talking about.

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, we have a five point plan, which starts with more cash from the federal government. That is what I spoke about today. The federal government is putting in about 12 cents or 13 cents on the dollar. It used to be 50 cents on the dollar and we have to start moving back toward that level of contribution.

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, today's debate is a very important one in terms of the future of health care in the country.

I come from Regina. Regina was the birthplace of public health care in the country many years ago. It really started with the CCF in the election of 1944. It was after the Great Depression and there had not been an election since 1938 in the province. The previous Liberal government had gone on for six years during the war without an election campaign. When the campaign came, Tommy Douglas and the CCF were swept to power. One of the promises they made to the people of that province was for health care and hospitalization.

In those days there was not any thought at all of the federal government cost sharing health care. Under our constitution, health care comes under the jurisdiction of the provinces and the federal government gets involved through the use of the spending power, but it was a long time before those discussions were held.

The CCF came to power in that small province of about one million people. They had come through the Great Depression and a tremendous dust bowl in terms of drought. There was bankruptcy such that the province was almost foreclosed upon by the bankers. Despite that, three or four years after it came to power, the CCF set up the first hospitalization plan anywhere in North America. That was about 1948.

As the years went on, it became more and more popular and the idea caught on around the country that public health care was extremely important. By the time the CCF government had improved and strengthened the economy with balanced budgets and so on, it made a commitment. In 1960 with Tommy Douglas as premier, it promised it would bring in North America's first public medicare program.

The people of Saskatchewan re-elected Tommy Douglas and the CCF and they had a mandate to bring in public health care. Tommy Douglas resigned about a year later to become the leader of the federal New Democratic Party, but the minister of education, Mr. Woodrow Lloyd, became premier. It was Mr. Lloyd who was premier at the time medicare became a reality in the province of Saskatchewan.

I was 14 or 15 years old at the time and just going into high school. I remember the summer of 1961 or 1962 when health care came in. There was a doctors' strike against what they called the socialistic move to intervene in the marketplace in terms of health care. The opposition of course was the Liberal Party but it was a very conservative Liberal Party, quite similar to what is called the Canadian Alliance today or the Reform Party. It opposed this as a tremendous infringement on the freedom of Saskatchewan people and predicted that it would spread across the country.

The doctors' strike went on for about 28 days and created a great deal of emotion. There were many demonstrations and a lot of struggle and debate in the province, but the provincial government prevailed. I remember very well seeing a picture of the leader of the opposition, because the legislature was not in session in the summer, going to the legislative chamber and demanding that the speaker call a special session to deal with the doctors' strike. Of course it did not happen, but I still remember the picture of him kicking the door of the Saskatchewan legislature. He had his foot up in the air and he was kicking the door. That snapshot of him went right across the country.

The people prevailed and the CCF government of Woodrow Lloyd prevailed. In 1961 and 1962 we had our first ever medicare system anywhere in the country, financed entirely by the people of the province of Saskatchewan as the federal government was not involved in any way in a cost sharing program in those days.

A few years later the federal government established the Hall commission with Justice Emmett Hall of the supreme court. He looked at the idea of a national health care program and federal funding for health care along with the provinces in a co-funding operation.

In 1967, centennial year, I think Lester Pearson was Prime Minister at the time and the health minister was Paul Martin Sr., the federal government finally brought in a national health care program modelled on the prototype in the province of Saskatchewan. The agreement was that the federal government would cost share with the provinces 50% of the costs for health care. In other words for every dollar put up by the province of Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, or British Columbia the federal government would put up a dollar as well.

In the original negotiations the federal government was not going to be that benevolent or generous. But guess what, it was an Ontario premier in those days as well, and the Government of Ontario under Robarts was threatening not to participate in the national health care program. When the federal government decided to put up 50% of the costs, the carrot was so big that even Ontario with its wealth in those days decided it could not afford not to participate and became part of the national health care program we know today.

Things went pretty smoothly for a number of years. Then in the 1970s if I recall—I was a member of parliament by that time being elected in 1968—the federal government of Pierre Trudeau brought in a bill that untied the federal contribution from going directly to health care in terms of the transfers to the provinces. I remember Tommy Douglas sat roughly where the Conservative Party is sitting today at the far end of the Chamber. He stood up and said that if we untied the federal contribution to health care, that which goes directly to health care, the day would come when the federal government involvement would lessen gradually and gradually and we would have a crisis in the funding of health care.

I remember him speaking in Winnipeg in about 1981 or 1982 and giving the same warning in front of a huge crowd at a national convention. I remember him saying that people assume that health care is here to stay. We assume it is here. It is a good plan. We assume it is here forever but some day someone is going to try to take it away and that day is not too far down the road. How true that was.

If I were to sit back in those days and predict who would try to do it, I do not think I would have predicted it would be a Liberal government that would get us into a health care crisis. However it was the Liberal government, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance and their famous budget in 1995 that had the most radical cutbacks in social programs and health care this country has ever seen at any level of jurisdiction in the history of Canada.

I look across the way at the member from New Brunswick, the minister in charge of homelessness, the Minister of Labour. I know her background in activism. I sometimes wonder how she can sit in that government and support it after these tremendous conservative cutbacks that Brian Mulroney would not have even contemplated in his most conservative days when he was Prime Minister.

That is the legacy of the Liberal Party that sits across the way. Now we are in a crisis. We are in a crisis where some provinces, such as Alberta, are getting into the business of two tier medicine and looking at privatizing part of the medical system, allowing people to get back into health care for a profit. If we go down that steep and slippery road, the time will come when health care will be destroyed. We will have two systems in this country, one for the rich who can afford to buy the extras, jump the queues, get health care, and one for the poor who have to line up at the doors of public care institutions.

The reason public health care started in the first place was so that each and every Canadian citizen, regardless of wealth, regardless of income, regardless of region would have equal access to a public health care system. That is the kind of system we are going to have to keep in this country.

I will close by saying something that makes it even more sad in my opinion. I picked up this morning's newspaper and the headline was, “Federal surplus is higher by $11 billion”. The federal surplus is $11 billion higher for the year 1999-2000 than was predicted in the budget last February. In other words the federal surplus will be $14.9 billion instead of the predicted $3.9 billion, an extra $11 billion. A lot of that extra $11 billion could have been spent on health care in terms of helping the crisis from one end of the country to the other.

The money is there. It is not as if we were running a huge deficit. It is not as if we cannot afford to do this. The money is there. What we are lacking is the political will. That is why we tabled this motion in the House today to try to instigate a great national debate, to say “Health care is the most important priority in the country. It is about time we reinvest in social programs, starting with health care”. The money is there. Let us use the people's money to invest in a good health care system for the people of this country for our future.

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I know the Canadian Alliance finished with 4% in Newfoundland slightly ahead of the extreme wrestling party. That tells how much credibility it has on health care.

I noticed yesterday the Minister of Finance announced that the surplus for 1999-2000 was $11 billion higher than projected in February. Would the leader agree with me that this money should be spent on health care, on the CBC and on other social programs that are a necessity for the future development of our country?

[Banking, April 13th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance. The Royal Bank has announced that there will be a hike in service charges on July 1. This comes at a time when the banks are making billions of dollars in profits. Meanwhile the National Council of Welfare has stated that banks could easily provide Canadians with a minimum 16 basic charges a month for a fee of $2.

In light of that, will the minister send a message today to bankers to tell them that financial services legislation will be introduced in the House next month and that the legislation includes a guaranteed access for all Canadians to a low cost, no frill account that is available to everyone in the country.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2000, April 12th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, the member wants more free enterprise, more competition and more private sector activity. I assume he was referring to health care. My answer is no, that is not what Canadian people want.

They have told us time and time again that they want a public health care system adequately funded by the federal government and the provinces to serve the people. That is the age of the dinosaur and that is not the way we are going.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2000, April 12th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to say a few words in the debate on the budget implementation bill before the House. We have had a budget before the House for quite some time. When we deal with the implementation bill, we have to ask ourselves what kind of a society we want and what the goals and objectives should be in terms of the budgeting process for the Government of Canada.

For the first time in a long while we have a surplus with which to work. The minister said in his budget update in November that he thought there would be a surplus of around $100 billion over five years. It will probably be more than that. It may be $110 million or $120 billion or perhaps even more, because in general the economy is doing pretty well.

If we look at the growth rate in this country compared to that in the United States, it is actually quite high. Revenues to the government are increasing. When the growth rate is high fewer people are unemployed and fewer people draw unemployment insurance and welfare. There are fewer costs in the social services system and therefore the coffers of the government continue to expand and expand.

We have no idea for how long this economic expansion will last. We have no idea how long the expansion of government revenue will last. In many ways it is very difficult to project into the future. We have to work with the numbers we have. For the first time in many years we have a budget surplus that will go on for quite some time. This is different from the last part of the 1980s or throughout the 1990s when we had to talk about how we deal with debts and deficits and how we deal with valid programs that could not go ahead because of the fiscal crunch.

We now have choices before us and we have to decide what kind of an agenda we want. When I think of the agenda of the future I think what should motivate us is doing the most we can for the common good of the Canadian people in terms of creating a society in which there is more equality of condition and more equality of services. People should be empowered through a better democratic system. We should build a society on co-operation and play an international role in terms of development in the third world and the promotion of world peace. Those should be the goals and the objectives.

If we are to fulfil a goal that speaks to doing the best for the common good, it seems to me we should start now by reinvesting in programs that were cut back by the government a few years ago in the fight against the debt and the deficit, namely our social programs.

If we look at the last number of years and take health care as an example, a tremendous sacrifice was made by the health care sector to fight the deficit. About $30 billion have been taken out of the health care system. That is an awful lot of money, and we have problems in health care today.

We all know that the only problem is not money. The big problem is that $30 billion are missing. Another way of putting it is that when the Minister of Finance decided to radically cut back on health care and social programs in his budget of 1994-95 the payments made at that time compared to the payments now show a deficit of about $4.2 billion a year. To get back to 1994-95 levels it would mean an increase in spending on health care of around $4.2 billion a year. That extra money would go a long way in terms of making sure that we address our health care problems.

Another thing about health care is that even in its most recent budget the government decided that health care and social programs were not priorities. Indeed the priority for the Minister of Finance was a tax cut of some $58 billion over four years. In other words, for every dollar in tax cuts the government will put two cents into health care. That is not the right priority.

The right priority should be to reinvest once again in our social programs, in particular health care, to build a strong health care sector and make sure that we serve people so that they can go to hospital or to a doctor and obtain equal service regardless of income or background. That is not the case.

Because of this some provinces like Alberta are introducing a bill like its bill 11 to set up a partially privatized health care system. I disagree with bill 11. I disagree with that direction. Under the NAFTA if Alberta does that and allows a privatization of health care or a two tier system in health care, it will have to go right across the country because the corporations in private health care have the right to do it not just in one province but across the country. Therefore that is a dangerous precedent to set.

One reason that is happening is the big cutbacks in health care to Alberta, to every province in the country. In my province of Saskatchewan about 13 cents on the dollar come from Ottawa and 87 cents on the dollar are paid by the province of cash injection into health care. In Ontario about 89 cents are put up by the Ontario taxpayer and about 11 cents are put up by the federal government in terms of health care.

At one time the federal government paid 50 cents on the dollar in terms of funding health care when medicare was founded back in the 1960s. After the seventies it started to pull back, to withdraw. Now that we have a fiscal surplus, a fiscal dividend, a major part of it should go into health care to make sure we have a public health care system for each and every Canadian citizen. If we do not do that and the provinces start to privatize, we will lose health care and end up with a two tier American system that is unfair, unequal and very expensive.

A greater percentage of the GDP in the United States is spent on health care than in Canada. We have a public health care system in this country. In that country there is a mixed system. Some 48 million Americans do not have any health care. Those who do not have health care are mainly the poor people, particularly the black people in the United States because of the socioeconomic condition that they find themselves in.

It is extremely unfair to have a health care system that is built on the size of a person's pocket book or bank account and not on treating people as equals. That is the way we are going unless we convince the Minister of Finance and the government across the way that the time has come to put cash on the table and make sure that we build once again toward Ottawa paying up to 50% of the cost of health care in Canada. That should be our number one priority.

In addition, we have the whole question of education and the federal government withdrawing money for post-secondary education. There is a need to reinvest in young people for post-secondary education, for skills, for training and for research and development. If we are to build a strong society and a strong economy in the years that lie ahead, knowledge becomes extremely important. Knowledge is extremely important in terms of building a strong economy. We need a strongly motivated, highly knowledgeable and highly educated workforce. It is the obligation of the federal government to put up more money to make sure we have a workforce that is highly trained and highly skilled.

Those should be the major priorities of the government across the way, but it seems to me that the government has been intimidated by what we used to call the Reform Party. I am sure the Chair would agree that the Reform Party has had a great impact on the agenda of Canada which calls for smaller government, cutbacks in health care, cutbacks in education, cutbacks in the powers of the Canadian Wheat Board, and cutbacks in anything that has to do with the common good or the sense of community. It wants to cut back, cut back, cut back and reduce the role of government, to the point now where the size of government spending is 11.6% of the GDP, the lowest level since the second world war.

I do not know why the Liberal government is afraid of the Reform Party in terms of setting the agenda. The government across the way is the real Conservative Party. We have a more Conservative government now than we had with Brian Mulroney in 1984 and 1988 till 1993.

That has been the agenda, but that is not where the people of the country want to go. In poll after poll after poll they are saying that health care is number one. We need a public system of health care. It should not be privatized. We do not want a two tier American style medicine. That is what the Canadian people are saying. For that we need more federal money going into health care.

My Liberal friends across the way should not be intimidated by this reborn Reform Party, the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party of Canada. The last time I looked at the Gallup poll it is still sitting at 9%, so why be afraid of it? Why have an agenda that is going to the right and is more conservative than the Conservatives?

We need real progressive change. We need some social democracy. That is where the Canadian people are at and that is what the Canadian people want.

[Canada Pension Plan, April 11th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.

As the minister knows, there are about 100 firefighters on Parliament Hill today asking parliament to make changes to the Canada pension plan so that they can qualify for early retirement benefits at the age of 55 and full benefits at the age of 60, instead of the current ages of 60 and 65. The minister is also aware that the House of Commons finance committee made a similar recommendation last fall.

In light of that, will the minister now propose an amendment to the Canada pension plan so that firefighters can obtain benefits at an earlier age because of this essential and dangerous occupation?