Mr. Speaker, as the waiting list for affordable places in daycare is growing daily, why is the minister stubbornly refusing to consider real solutions, especially in the case of the 165 places that will disappear in his riding?
House of Commons photoWon her last election, in 2021, with 49% of the vote.
Child Care April 5th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, as the waiting list for affordable places in daycare is growing daily, why is the minister stubbornly refusing to consider real solutions, especially in the case of the 165 places that will disappear in his riding?
Child Care April 5th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, thousands of Canadian families with children are on waiting lists for early learning and child care. Yesterday the Speech from the Throne made only vague promises of working with the provinces and territories. This is simply not good enough for those families.
Will the minister commit to honouring the early learning and child care agreements that are already in place, or will she acknowledge that she really has nothing to offer these families?
Health October 24th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada is deeply concerned too.
The OMA report last week showed that this may be the first generation of children that do not live as long as their parents.
With the $300 million that we released last week, we are working with our provincial and territorial colleagues, with all stakeholders, with the food industry and with everyone we possibly can to help instill healthy choices being the easy choices, physical activity and better eating, to get healthy weights for all Canadians.
Health October 4th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, the members from Toronto take these infectious disease outbreaks very seriously.
The Ontario public health officials have been investigating it. They have ruled out SARS, avian flu and influenza. Dr. McKeown today feels that the outbreak is winding down. This weekend I was seriously impressed with the tremendous cooperation of Dr. David Butler-Jones, Dr. Sheila Basrur from the province, Dr. McKeown from Toronto, and Dr. Allison McGeer with regard to the infectious disease at Seven Oaks.
Health September 30th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her excellent testimony at the committee.
The establishment of the expert advisory panel and the hearings to ask Canadians their experience with these is a hallmark in terms of a new way of doing things. The minister awaits the results of this two phase process and will report as quickly as the decision is taken.
Emergency Preparedness September 30th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, we are very pleased to report that in April of this year the public health network for this country was established. The work is ongoing in memorandums of understanding in terms of professional nurses and doctors. This is very quickly in response to David Naylor's report, as well as the other hugely important issue around sharing of information. I think the member should be well assured that Dr. David Butler-Jones, Dr. Perry Kendall and the fabulous new network are doing terrific work with their subcommittees.
Public Health Agency June 9th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, I am sure the member joins with us in our pride at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and the leadership it has taken with the WHO. The four scientists from there have gone to Angola with this fancy, fabulous portable lab.
In this past week, two scientists, Dr. Heinz Feldmann and Dr. Steven Jones, together with their U.S. collaborators, have developed a vaccine, 100% effective in primates, that will lead to a human vaccine. We are absolutely thrilled that this is furthering the leadership that Canada has in global public health and fighting bioterrorism.
Supply June 7th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, we are looking to the initial Kirby report at the beginning as being a very good outline of where we need to be going in this country. We look forward to the final report in the fall.
The work that Michael Wilson will be doing with the Minister of Health is very much around the mental health efforts of the public service in this country and the role of the federal government with the people it directly looks after.
I hope the member will understand there is probably no more complex issue than mental health in this country in terms of not only the pure medical treatment but mainly around the supports and services that are required and the flexibility that is required to get people what they need when they want it. It will be together with our provincial and territorial colleagues and with specific help particularly working with our aboriginal peoples that we will design programs that really will help to change those unacceptable statistics around mental health.
Supply June 7th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, I do not see any contradiction in what the Minister of Health and I said at all. We are saying that there had been work on individual strategies in the past. The first ministers, the ministers of health and the WHO have said we need to pause and develop an integrated strategy in order to find out what things we could all be doing together and then what things could only be done in a disease specific strategy.
Things like causation, early detection and some of the management pieces are there, but on prevention promotion we need to make sure that we are getting the absolute best effect for every dollar we spend on prevention promotion. That requires an integrated disease strategy foremost. We then need to work with the kinds of partners who have been involved in the coalition for cancer control in order to look at the kinds of things that are there and the things that need to be there.
It is extraordinarily important to understand that this must and will be done with our provincial and territorial colleagues. That is where it has to be. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Auditor General will not be interested in our putting it in any arm's length body.
Supply June 7th, 2005
Mr. Speaker, the hon. member raised the matter of a national strategy to fight disease. I agree with him. A real strategy is vital in order to demonstrate what, when and how.
We began with the integrated strategy on healthy living and chronic disease and the Canadian diabetes strategy.
It was very exciting last year to hear the first ministers talk about prevention promotion in the same sentence as the sustainability of our cherished public health system. The first ministers focused on three things: an integrated disease strategy; choosing some public health goals for Canada; and school health, which is probably the best place to focus on these modifiable risks.
As Canadians, it is important for us to understand that it is time we put the health back into health care. We have to recognize that the health of Canadians will not be solved in just one government department. It must involve all government departments across all jurisdictions.
We also have to work on the determinants of health, such as poverty, violence, the environment, shelter, equity, and education. When we look at the numbers based on those determinants we find that there are unacceptable disparities in health outcomes.
It is hugely important that we put together the modifiable risks that are common for heart disease, cancer, lung disease and many other diseases. We could do much better by using an integrated strategy rather than parallel strategies disease by disease.
The Prime Minister showed leadership in establishing the Public Health Agency of Canada and by putting in place a Chief Public Health Officer of Canada. He has actually begun the work on getting back to what Tommy Douglas said would be the ultimate goal of medicare, which is to prevent disease before it occurs rather than just patch people up once they are sick. This is about what David Butler-Jones, the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, calls the moral responsibility, that we all have to prevent the preventable.
We want to ensure that as we move forward that no one in this country gets cancer who need not have and no one gets heart disease who did not need to. It is important that we prevent all kinds of lung disease and that we put in place a society that prevents and supports people's mental health such that they end up not in trouble.
Every year in Canada more than three-quarters of deaths result from one of the four groups of chronic diseases: cardiovascular; cancer; diabetes; and respiratory. Half of all Canadians have a chronic disease. Risk factors leading to these diseases, such as physical inactivity and unhealthy eating are growing. Health disparities between population groups are growing, as is the burden of preventable diseases, disability and death.
These diseases are highly preventable. The World Health Organization has found that 90% of diabetes type II adult onset is preventable; 80% of heart disease and 30% to 50% of cancer is preventable by changes to the risk factors such as smoking, physical inactivity and healthy eating. It is not simply a matter of individuals changing their own habits to prevent the onset of disease or improve their health once they have a disease. It is a matter of changing our entire society so that the healthy choices are the easy choices to make.
The best example of the comprehensive approach to risk factor reduction is tobacco control. The percentage of the population who smoke has changed radically over the last three decades. Individual actions have been complemented by the efforts of government, NGOs, health professionals and researchers who offer one on one interventions, supportive community programming, social marketing, tax policy, regulations and legislation.
This is an example of how a strategy can really work. In 1985, 35% of Canadians smoked. In the past year only 20% smoked. We know that smoking reduction has had a tremendous effect on heart disease, lung cancer and the other affected diseases.
There are two different approaches. Comprehensive strategies to address chronic disease and injury can be divided into two categories. One is the integrated strategy that the first ministers asked us to focus on. Those address more than one risk factor of one disease at once. The other is the specific, those that focus only on one risk factor or disease. Health Canada and the Public Health Agency have been working in both of these areas. This is consistent with the approach endorsed by the WHO.
The disease specific strategies for the major chronic diseases of diabetes, cancer and heart disease are at various stages of development. To date, only one, the Canadian diabetes strategy, has had any significant investment by the federal government at $30 million annually.
National strategies are done by collaboration among governments and a wide variety of stakeholders. It is envisioned coordinated action from upstream to downstream, taking and promoting health, preventing the onset of disease, finding it as early as possible, treating it and preventing it from getting worse, and caring for the people dying of the disease.
These strategies will also complement the development of a health and environment agenda. As we debate this motion today we must understand that having a Canadian strategy for cancer control will be extraordinarily important as it is the leading cause of premature disability in Canada.
We acknowledge the collaborative work of the coalitions on the strategy for cancer control. We now have to ensure that proper investments are determined to ensure the effective focus on prevention promotion and also in actually determining the causes of certain diseases. We are interested right now in how second-hand smoke may actually be involved in the incidence of breast cancer. It is important to be able to figure out causes, then move to prevention promotion, as well as early detection and management.
We must focus on things that we already know we should be doing better, such as mammography. It is unacceptable that the majority of Canadian women over the age of 50 are still not getting a mammogram even though we know it can affect their length of life.
As the fabulous Ian Shugart said to me this morning, there are some things we know we are doing, some things we know we are not doing, some things we know we are doing but we do not know enough about, and some things we just do not know. We have to look into all of this with the appropriate research so that we always fund what works and stop funding what does not work. We need a capacity for real surveillance to put together the pieces around cause, determinants, risk, as well as where it overlaps with heart disease.
I look forward to working with all the partners and particularly with our provincial and territorial colleagues in looking at the dollars that are already being invested in tobacco strategies, the dollars already put aside for the wait list strategy that will affect both cancer and heart disease. We need to know what is there in the strategy for cancer, what is there in the integrated strategy and what is there in these other strategies around wait times and tobacco so we come up very quickly with a very comprehensive approach.
As we look into what the member outlined in terms of the needs around mental health, we need to focus on how the federal government needs to do a better job. The Minister of Health's appointment of Michael Wilson is absolutely brilliant in making us, as the Public Service of Canada, the best we possibly can be in terms of exemplary employers. We need to look at the mental health issue and what we will do interdepartmentally in the areas for which we have direct responsibility, our veterans, our military, corrections, the RCMP, as well as the public service.
It is important to move forward on developing a strategy on heart disease, although heart disease is probably the one thing on which we are doing a little bit better, because of the smoking and tobacco control. We have done groundbreaking work in Canada on cardiovascular disease prevention and control. It is important that we pass the 2005 budget so we can deploy that $300 million to the integrated strategies.
The 2005 budget further expands initial investments in the Public Health Agency of Canada and provides $300 million over five years for an integrated strategy on healthy living and chronic disease.
It is going to be extraordinarily important to work together with the provinces and the territories, with the voluntary sector, with all of the health care providers, and with the citizens of Canada who understand that they can have input on health policy as well. We want to move forward. We need to pass the budget. Then we need to work with our partners to get this done.