Keith Martin

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 31st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, it is true that one of the untold stories of our times is that the current government was given a $13 billion surplus. When times were good, it actually had the largest spending increase that we had seen in many decades and it burned through that surplus rather than using it more responsibly. That was highly irresponsible. The Prime Minister took Canada to the brink, and then when we faced this economic downturn, it thrust Canada off the cliff. Today we are sustaining this $56 billion deficit, which would have been much less if the government had actually done the responsible thing when times were good and lived within its means. This is not well known in the public but it is the truth.

Although the management of health care is a provincial jurisdiction, unless the government is willing to tackle the issue of health care and health care expenditures, then no matter what it or a province does, the provinces are going to be in a completely unsustainable situation. Patients will suffer and provinces will delist or ration care because they will not be able to meet their budgets.

I remember when I worked in emergency, I had to treat patients in the hallway in the emergency department, which I thought was completely disrespectful to them. But what can I do as the physician when all of the beds are completely filled in the emergency department? I have to treat people in the hallway. That is the cold reality of what doctors and nurses are being faced with across our country today.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 31st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the interesting thing is that the hon. member forgot about the political realities in Canada today. He neglected to mention them.

I do not know if the member has the luxury of voting against the government, but the issue of whether or not there will be an election really falls on the Liberal Party. I would ask the gentleman whether or not he thinks the Canadian public would have liked another election only a few months after we had had an election. The Canadian public said very clearly to us that it did not want an election. The member knows full well that if we had defeated that budget, there would have been an election.

The Liberal Party wants to work with the government, indeed with all parties, with an effective, balanced approach in order to have a strong economy and stable social programs. In fact my seatmate, who happens to be our party's finance critic, has offered many intelligent and constructive solutions to the government, as have many members of my caucus.

I hope the government listens because if it does not, our country is going to get hurt. We will continue to try to work with the government for the betterment of our country.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 31st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this issue. It goes to the heart of the lives of Canadians from coast to coast. Right now we are dealing with the largest deficit we have seen in three decades. Our debt is going up. When the government came into power, it was lucky enough to have a balanced approach between debt reduction, spending and also tax reductions. That was the one-third, one-third, one-third policy when we were in government.

It left the current government in good stead. It gave it a surplus. It also gave it a very solid banking system. The Liberal government of the day refused to adopt a number of initiatives that would have changed banking in Canada and would have enabled us to be much more susceptible to the economic viruses that have destroyed so many banks, banking systems and economies across the globe. However, that did not happen, and we are thankful for it.

The government has to listen. Instead of adopting the ideology that was so destructive south of the border in the time of President Bush and President Reagan, it really has to look at what has worked for Canadians. It needs to ensure we follow a path that is good for our citizens and not adopt an ideological approach that has been proven to be very destructive.

The tax reductions and the absence of spending control south of the border has been incredibly destructive to the U.S. economy, to the degree that I am extremely worried about what will happen there. When the Americans catch a cold, we get pneumonia. Despite the good management and monitoring of our fiscal systems in Canada, we have a very high risk of running into serious problems because of what will happen in the states.

I think all of us in the House would plead with the government and strongly recommend that it not follow the course of action that we saw during the time of those two presidents. It has proven to be very destructive on so many levels. Most important, it hurts the citizens who we serve.

We also have other international storm clouds afoot, including increasing competition, particularly from China and India. China now has foreign reserves in excess of $1 trillion. This is a very powerful lever that the Chinese have on us. In fact, the Chinese are using their foreign and economic policies to secure major sectors of the world that have natural resources, particularly South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. Africa contains more than half of the world's natural resources.

The Conservative government has been missing in action in many of these areas. It has taken a much more narrow view in its foreign policy. This is a much larger game. To look at things in a very parochial fashion takes Canada out of the playing field and it will hurt our citizens. In this globalized world, unless we use all the tools we have, from foreign policy to trade to defence to economics and aid, we will not be in the game.

Not being in the global game will mean that our economy, our workers and our businesses will be at a disadvantage. Therefore, I ask the government to think of using all of those tools in how we enable our country to have a very prominent future. We have ensure that our citizens will have as good a future, if not a better future, than what we have had. One of the great challenges the government has is how to enable that to happen.

Let us look at some of those solutions. I know the leader of my party has been very strong, and wisely so, on investing in education. Although this is a provincial responsibility, nothing prevents the government from using its convening powers to work with the provinces to serve our citizens. The ability of our citizens to acquire the skills they need to garner a well-paying job is crucial for not only their economic future but also for their health.

I strongly recommend that the government work with a coalition of provinces that are willing to look at how we deal with people having access to skills training so it is not a financial burden to them. The movement of people across provincial boundaries is crucial. The recognition of skill sets and removing those boundaries for Canadians to move across provinces is essential. If we remove the barriers to trade and mobility, we will have a much more nimble and successful economy.

Investing in infrastructure and in research and development is crucial, not only in people and infrastructure but also operating costs. Researchers cannot do their job unless they have the tools to pay the operating costs for their research.

I also encourage the government to work with groups like the MaRS Centre in the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia and other universities to operationalize the our research. The phenomenal research taking place in Canada is exciting. One of the major challenges is to take those discoveries from bench to bedside, to take the research we know and operationalize it.

I attended the pediatric academic sciences conference in Vancouver three weeks ago, which is the largest collection of pediatric scientists in the world, 6,000 were there. When I listened to the great research that had been done, it struck me that there were things we know could save the lives a lot of people. We have all this knowledge, but that knowledge is not getting to the bedside. This was one of the laments that many of the researchers had.

I suggest there is a great opportunity for Canada to be a leader in translational research, and that is getting the research, getting it to bedside, getting what we know and getting it operational on the ground. This is the great challenge and a great opportunity in the future.

Another thing I suggest is we know our economic situation will never be solid unless we can get our health care spending under control. Health care costs are growing at 6.5% per year, revenues at 2.5% to 3% on average in good years. That means we have a delta, a separation between demand for health care and supply resources, so much so that in the next 20 years any province will have 80% of its entire budget consumed by health care. Right now in many provinces it is approaching 50%, which means there is less and less space for education, infrastructure, welfare and other social programs.

The provinces are being squeezed by this huge creature called the health care system, which is gobbling up more and more of their resources. We cannot get away from it. This is the single greatest challenge any government will have. As President Obama's budget officer has said, unless they get their health care costs under control in the U.S., nothing else will make any difference.

In my personal view, the only way to do that is to modernize the Canada Health Act to allow provinces to explore different options. I strongly recommend that the government look at what happened in Europe, where 17 of the top 20 health care systems are. Why do we not look at those mixed systems, the way they fund health care systems in terms of paying for results, for patient services, as opposed to block funding, and better use of IT technologies. There are a lot of things we can do, but, again, the government needs to use its convening powers to work with the provinces to make this happen.

On the prevention side of health care, the average child in Canada sits and watches television or a computer screen for 40 hours a week. That is staggering. As a result, this generation of children will be the first generation in history to have a shorter lifespan than their parents, which means we will have a much higher incidence of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular problems. This will put a huge pressure on our health care system. Therefore, we need to encourage children to be active, to get out and play, by having them turn off the television sets and video games one night a week. Getting them out is crucially important to enable children to have a better life.

I could talk about pension renewal and reform. The average age when pensions came in was 58. Now the average age is 80 for men and 82 for women in our country. Therefore, I encourage the government to look at pension renewal and reform and allow people to work beyond age 65. There are lots of things we can do with that.

These issues are too important to lie fallow. All of us in the House feel too many issues are being dealt with that are not germane and not important to the average person on the street. We have to tackle these issues of the economy, social programs and have a balanced, effective science-based approach to deal with these challenges. If we do not, people will get hurt and when that happens, we have violated our responsibility to our public.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 31st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague for his excellent speech.

One of the most sensitive indicators of the health of a population is in childhood health. In our country, unfortunately, over the last three to four years or so we have seen something terrible happen. Our newborn mortality rate has actually increased significantly.

Canada has moved from being sixth in the world, in terms of our newborn mortality rate, and dropped to 22nd in the world. This is a very sensitive indicator of not only the health of our population but also the efficacy of our health care system.

I would like to ask my colleague, does he not think that the current Conservative government has actually been asleep at the switch on one of the most important issues affecting Canadians, and that is the issue of the health care system that we have today and also the health of our population?

[The Economy, May 31st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I have two questions for my colleague.

Does he not think that the current economic situation we are in right now is, in large part, due to the fact that bank mergers were not allowed to go ahead by the Liberal government and, second, that the Liberals gave the current Conservative government very good fiscal footing having surplus budgets?

On the issue of moving toward green technologies and modernizing our economy, does he agree with the flowthrough tariff system, that is occurring in Germany as well as in Ontario under Premier McGuinty, that will enable us to incentivize the private sector in moving toward adopting new innovative green technologies?

[Health Care System, May 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to compliment the member for introducing this motion. As a physician, it is a breath of fresh air to have health care finally discussed in this House.

I remember working in the emergency department and having to treat patients in the hallway. I remember having to airvac patients out of the town I was working in just because we did not have a health care worker, a technologist, who could do a CT scan on the person to identify potential problems.

Canadian society is in the process of slamming into a brick wall on health care because the resources that we have to pay for, what we ask for and need, are not there. As time passes, as our population ages, that gap between the supply of resources and the demands that we have on our health care system is simply going to widen. What has happened is that those who are least able to afford it are falling through the cracks. They are the ones who are being hurt by inaction. They are the ones who are going to be hurt if all we do is talk about things and fail to act.

We understand full well that the responsibility for health care is in the purview of the provinces, but nothing prevents the federal government from using its convening powers to work with the provinces that want to work with us, to get things done that we need to have done.

The fact of the matter is that we are constrained by a Canada Health Act that was good in its time but needs to be modernized. It cannot function and it cannot do what needs to be done. Our provinces cannot do what they need to do, if we are going to be constrained by the situation we have today.

If we look at the top 20 health care systems in the world, 17 of those health care systems are in Europe. This ridiculous discussion that we have, that if it is not ours it must be in the U.S., is a nonsensical debate. The real debate we should be having, and the answers we should be pursuing, is who has the best health care system. We need to just peer out toward Europe and we will find that 17 of the 20 best health care systems in the world are there.

What are their characteristics? The member, quite rightly and wisely, put technological development as one of her three requirements. If we look at Europe, it uses IT tools much more effectively than we do. We absolutely must be able to use IT tools to reduce duplication, reduce waste, and improve efficiencies in the system. It is ludicrous that we are so far behind the times.

The second point in this area that Canadians might need to know is that while we discover all these remarkable things in medicine, Canadians have access to them in a limited way. The reason for this is because provincial governments have to withhold or ration care and they cannot afford to provide the best care that is available, so the scientific discoveries that we are making are not available to the Canadian public because governments do not have the money to pay for them. There is this gap and Canada ranks somewhere in the 20th to 25th range in terms of access to new technologies by our citizens.

The second part dealing with health care professionals, and the member was again right to put this in, is that we desperately need a national health care workforce strategy. As we get older, our health care professionals are getting older as well. The average age of a nurse is about 42. The average age in some specialties in medicine, as a physician in my profession, is somewhere in the fifties. We cannot train a doctor in four years. It takes 12 years or more to train certain types of specialists.

We cannot easily reproduce them. We desperately need this strategy to be implemented with the provinces, not only for physicians and nurses but also for technicians and other health care professionals who are part of our team and who enable us to serve the public we treat.

The third area deals with healthy living and prevention. Last week I was privileged to attend the big Pediatric Academic Societies' conference in Vancouver. It is the largest of its kind in the world and 6,000 of the top pediatric scientists in the world were there. One of the big issues that was talked about, as the hon. member mentioned, is the epidemic of childhood obesity.

Dr. Tremblay from Montreal did a phenomenal study comparing Canadians from 1981 to today and his results were shocking. He found that from 1981 to today, the level of obesity has increased dramatically. Fitness levels have plummeted. Part of the reason is that the average Canadian child watches 40 hours of television per week or the child is in front of a screen playing video games. This is ridiculous. We were not designed to do this.

As a result, we are seeing chronic diseases that are now shifting lower and earlier in the demographics. Younger people are having higher incidences of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular problems. The result of this is that it is putting a huge and increasing burden on our health care system, and that in combination with our aging population will essentially break the back of our health care system unless we act and act quickly.

One of the motions I introduced recently is very simple. Why do we not all advocate for parents to turn off the television sets and turn off the video games one night per week, just one night a week? Get kids out and active. If they are out and active, engaging in free play, they will be able to dramatically change not only their physical abilities but also their mental abilities.

We have found that we can now actually peer into the developing child's brain. We know that from the prenatal stage through the first five years of life we can have the most dramatic impact upon the trajectory of that child into adulthood.

Subject children to a loving, caring environment with proper nutrition, where they are subjected to being read to and actually reading books later on, and what happens is that the connections in the brain actually happen well. Conversely, subject children to violence and sexual abuse, where they are witnessing drug abuse and violence, and give them poor diets, the neural connections that take place happen very poorly.

As a result of that, because the frontal cortex and the lower parts of the brain are not connected well, we see a much higher incidence of drug use, juvenile crime, poor outcomes in school, more dependence on welfare, and poor social and economic outcomes.

It is essential that what we do in the first five years of life has a dramatic effect on the trajectory of that child. If the government wants to really do something in terms of reducing crime, for Heaven's sake, work with the provinces to enable them to have an early learning program for children, during the prenatal stage and through the first five years of the children. If we do that, it will have a dramatic and profound impact upon the life of those children.

Kids need free play. The other thing we can advocate in the public health aspect is to take kids to the library. Drop them off at the library, leave them there for an hour, let them roam the books, and let them use their imagination. If that is done, then they will have a chance to read. We know that literacy is one of the most powerful ways in which we can improve the trajectory of children later on in life.

These are simple things, inexpensive and easy to do. Also, kids who are plugged into TV sets and video games are not engaging in learning or having the imagination and the social skills they need to function well as adults.

That kind of free play and socialization may sound subtle in many ways, but it has to be done because those subtle interactions that take place enable the neuro connections and enable children to move forward and acquire the skills sets they need later on.

To summarize, in order to enable us to have a health care system that serves the public later on, which we must have, we have to work with like-minded provinces. We have to modernize the Canada Health Act. We have to bury our ideology. We have to pursue the facts and the science. The solutions are out there and we have to implement them. Talking is not going to save anybody's life. Only action will.

Second, we have to implement the national workforce strategy with the provinces. Again, let us ensure that we look at solutions that work. Let us look at Europe. Why does Europe have 17 of the top 20 systems? Let us look at their funding models, how they enable the governments and the private sector to work together, how they treat their health care workers, how they acquire and retain health care workers, and what they do in terms of prevention.

That package of solutions will enable us to ensure that our citizens, when they get sick, will have a health care system that will be there to treat them and will treat them well.

[Health Care System, May 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I compliment the member on her speech.

As a health professional, I would like to ask her one thing. We have a massive problem in our country in terms of not having a national strategy for health care workers. I would like to ask the member whether or not she will ask her Minister of Health to put together a national strategy for health care professionals, so we know how many and where we need physicians, nurses and technicians in order to have the personnel to service our health system. Right now, one of the major problems we have is that as we get older, so too do our caregivers. We have a massive deficit and that deficit will grow as time passes.

[National Defence, May 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, while we celebrate the navy's 100th anniversary, the government is gutting our navy.

According to Admiral McFadden, half of his combat systems are going to be cut. Anti-submarine capabilities are going to be cut. Worst of all, key weapons systems to protect our sailors are going to be cut.

Why is the government choosing to gut our navy and put the lives of our brave men and women sailors at risk?

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend for his very astute question.

I think one of the things we would like to make sure of when this bill goes to committee is that the first decision phase would actually be effective, that there would be a proper assessment. If that happened, then it would actually be possible to be more effective at separating those people who are trying to take advantage of the system from those who are true refugees.

There are a lot of sieves that could be put into place within that first decision-making phase that would enable us to accomplish that goal. I think giving our front-line workers the direction to do this is important.

My colleague also brings up a very important question about the individuals making this decision. Will they be political appointees, or will they be people of merit? Will they have the skill set to do this?

This is certainly one of the concerns the Auditor General has, and the concern we have, that the government is going to appoint individuals who are going to have the expertise, knowledge and training to be able to execute these very serious duties in a professional manner.

That is what we are going to ensure happens when this bill goes to committee.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, my colleague obviously has a lot of experience and knowledge in this area and he brought a lot of that to bear in his superb speech.

As the member knows, we did pursue the Refugee Appeal Division through changes in the past. The government did not do that, so the resolution of this is going to come in committee by working together to ensure that this is going to be resolved, whether it becomes a part of the bill or not. It is certainly a solution that the Liberal Party put forward and we look forward to working with the member to try to convince the government that this ought to be part of the bill and done in an appropriate, sensible and effective way.