Rob Merrifield

[Health Care System, October 28th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his question. First, I would like to clear something up. Our party is not calling for and never has called for a parallel two tier system. My reference to the patient paying was as a taxpayer. We all collectively pay. That is a Canadian value that we adhere to and that we support 100%. We asked for a timely, quality, sustainable system regardless of one's financial means. I want to make that very clear. I hope that answers that part of the question.

When it comes to prevention he is absolutely right. We have major problems in the country with the amount of obesity or cigarette smoking. The way to curb that is in the school system. The earlier we can catch the problem, the earlier we can educate our youth, and the better off we would be. Prevention is one of the fundamentals that we must do more about than just talk about it. We have talked about it for the last 20, 30, 40 years. It sounds really noble. It sounds like a wonderful thing, but if we are just going to talk about it and not really do anything about it, we are going nowhere. We must do more than that.

[Health Care System, October 28th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure and a privilege for me take part in this take note debate. However I have to question why we are even debating this. It is startling to me that we have a government that has been in power for a decade, with three majorities and three mandates, and it has put nothing more on the table on how to deliver health care. Here we are in the House at the government's call to debate health care.

I have no problem debating health care. In fact I really enjoy it and it is long overdue that we have a debate not only on health care but on health care reform and how to sustain it. That is needed and it is long overdue.

I listened very intently when my hon. colleagues from the Liberal Party put forward what they thought was rational debate on health care. I have failed to hear any new, innovative ideas about which we could have a true debate. It is very frustrating to me. We have been asked to come here to debate new ideas about reforming health care so we can sustain it into the 21st century and the government really has nothing on the table to debate.

I would like to talk a bit about what is going on with health care and what needs to be done to sustain it. In the throne speech we thought we would get a glimpse of the vision of the government and its plans for the future of health care. We saw absolutely nothing. There was very little vision and virtually nothing when it came to health care reform.

What do we see from the government? We see more studies. The Kirby report was delivered on Friday of last week. We have the Romanow report coming up next month. It is interesting that, since 1993, the government has commissioned enough studies that amount to $243 million and absolutely no reform. It is something that has to stop. We absolutely have to do more than just study health care. We have to implement it.

Some of the reforms and studies that have been going on in the provincial jurisdictions amaze me. I can point to the Clair Commission out of Quebec and the Fyke report out of Saskatchewan. Ontario, New Brunswick and B.C. are doing their own. Then there is the Mazankowski report of Alberta. It is frustrating to see the opposition coming from the federal side when we talk about some of these reports, especially the one in Alberta because it is the only one where we have seen a government actually implement the report.

We saw the report of the national forum on health in 1999, but it has sat on a shelf and nothing has been done. It was not that good things could not have happened in 1997, but they did not. Whether we will get somewhere with the Kirby Commission and the Romanow Commission has yet to be seen. It depends on whether the government will actually implement them. We hope that happens. What is actually happening in the meantime?

I just received a note, Mr. Speaker, I will be slitting my time with the hon. member for Peace River.

The Environics Research Group released a study two weeks ago. It said that eight out of ten Canadians want significant reforms to Canadian health care. That is absolutely amazing.

The Canadian Alliance Party felt that something had to be done in health care as well so we commissioned our own study after the last election because we did not think any government or any party really hit the nail on the head when it came to health care. We did that over the last couple of years. We came up with what we feel is a very clear policy that coincides with what we think Canadians are feeling.

Canadians are saying they want a timely health care system, one they can access in a timely way; one that is of high quality when we get to access it; one that is sustainable for their kids and their grandkids; and one which they can access regardless of their financial means. That system should take its eyes off itself and put them on the patient it is there to serve. It has to be a patient driven system. We need a government that realizes that the patient comes first because the patient is the one who is paying the bill. This needs to be looked at as we sustain health care in the future.

I talked a little about the Liberal legacy. The Liberals pulled money out of health care and watched the system drift into a crisis. We have seen the cracks get so wide in health care that it is shameful. The most unhealthy place to work in the country is within our facilities where moral is poor and the stress of the workplace is unbelievable. At the same time, waiting lists for people trying to get into the system are unacceptably high. We have over a million people on waiting lists right now who are trying to get into the system.

We have nurse shortages that have grown to unbelievable proportions. We know that we will need 113,000 new nurses between now and 2011. We need 2,500 doctors a year just to keep up with the present demand and that demand is growing more and more.

Just by watching the news media every evening, we see week in and week out the problems in health care, whether it is the lack of doctors in emergency rooms or ambulances that are held and are unable to deliver services according to their mandate, as one article stated last week. Every week one hears something new and astounding.

On top of that there are the cracks in the system where the employees of that system are frustrated. The nurses unions and health sciences people are striking. Doctors are striking in different provinces. We are seeing major problems.

Canada ranks 18th of the OECD nations in the number of MRIs, 17th in CT scanners and 8th in radiology equipment. If we cannot be first, I would like to know why. We should be first. That should be the goal. We should be striving for that. Canadians deserve to have the best health care system in the world, and they can have it. There is absolutely no reason why we are not.

In a 1988 poll, 43% of Canadians thought the health care system was fundamentally flawed. Last year that same poll was taken and that 43% had risen to 77% of Canadians who thought it was fatally flawed, and it is. Our health care system is ailing.

The Kirby report came out on Friday. I would like to make mention of a couple of things on which that committee worked hard. It tackled some complex problems that were politically charged. It was very thoughtful about its deliberations and we should applaud that 300 page report and some of its aspects.

Romanow was commissioned to do another report. The Kirby committee started two years ago. Romanow happened after that. In fact, we scratched our heads and wondered why the government would do that? Why would it spend another $15 million on a commission when it already had a Senate committee doing a very comprehensive study? Nonetheless, another $15 million has been spent.

The big question is whether it will actually be implemented? Will it go anywhere? Those are the questions we have to ask as we go forward.

Some things that have come out in the Kirby report are health care related. He has tried to sustain the health care system in the long run and has tried to expand it. I will mention a little more about that in a few minutes.

The thing that really puzzles me about the report is the new money that he has asked be put into it. Romanow likely will ask for the same thing. We said that back in 1997 when we said that it needed an injection of $4 billion a year. That is not new. What is amazing to me is we had a Liberal Senate committee struck to look into health care, yet it came forward and suggested we needed to raise taxes. When it comes to the kinds of changes that are needed for health care, that is fair ball. However I guess a leopard does not change its spots. When a committee dictates that we should raise taxes for this new money, then all of a sudden that puts on a political hat, and we dare not play politics with health care anymore.

It very frustrating to see the Kirby committee recommend a 1.5% increase in GST or national health care premiums. Where it gets the money is up to the government in power, not to Mr. Kirby. How that money is raised or where it comes from should be decided by the government in power. Throwing money into a broken system gives us a larger broken system, so that is not a solution we should be embracing.

It is absolutely amazing to see this kind of a report come forward when no study was undertaken even within the Kirby committee's deliberations to study from where the money should come from, yet this is one of the recommendations in the report.

If we do not add accountability into our system, if we do not reform it to a place where we hold the users and the providers more responsible and actually implement some of the reforms needed in our system, we will lose it. A health care system needs that efficiency. Any new money that goes into health care needs to have that as its ultimate goal. If not, we will lose it within a very short number of years.

It is very important that we keep that in mind when we look at implementing some of the changes that have been brought forward by the Kirby commission. We dare not allow another thing in health care, and that is what happened in the mid-1990s when we had unilateral cuts by this government in health care. It destabilized health care and put an unbelievable burden on the provincial governments to provide health care, which is their mandate.

My time is going very quickly and I would like to just make mention of what needs to take place when it comes to fixing the system.

When we fix the system, we do not expand a broken system to fix it. One thing Kirby also mentioned was that we should go into a pharmacare, home care and palliative care. Although those are limited within his report, we need to get the fundamentals right and we need to fix the system before we expand it and make it weaker. We really have to be careful of that.

When it comes drugs and what is happening with the Canadian drug problem, first, we do not debate that in this House. We do not debate the kinds of massive problems we have with addiction to prescription drugs, which is a reality that we need to talk about much more in this House. If the government had come with that as something to debate today, we would have had a really solid debate on some of the changes that need to take place.

However we agree with some of the things that are in the report, which are more placements for medical school and health care technologists. We absolutely need that. We also agree that there should be some sort of guarantee to the patients. He is focusing more on patients and the importance of putting patients first in his report. We have been saying that is long overdue.

There is absolutely no question that we have to get on with reforming the system, but we have to do it in a way that is sustainable to the system. One of the flies in the ointment of the Kirby commission is that most of what he talks about is provincial jurisdiction and that instead of taking the big stick approach with the provinces, we have to take the collaborative approach. What will be interesting, when we come to implement this, is to discern the difference between the provincial jurisdiction and the federal jurisdiction.

Looking forward, the government owes it to Canadians by acting quickly on these reports. We are calling for the action to take place within 90 days of Mr. Romanow's commission. That absolutely must take place. We dare not put these reports on a shelf and debate health care without recognizing the need to implement these reports.

[Health Care System, October 28th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the debate today and some of the comments being made, but I would like to clarify some of the misrepresentations that have been made. I will do that in a minute.

I am absolutely astounded at how the NDP can have things so wrong in its interpretation of what we are saying. We are saying very clearly that we are not asking for a parallel private system. I do not hear any province or any party in the House asking for that and yet we are being accused of it.

Why would members accuse us of that when we do not have a mandate to look after health care? We see health care falling apart at the seams by a government that has been in power for 10 years and yet the attack comes from there to here, which is absolutely astounding to me.

Would my hon. colleague like to stand and answer why the attack is there and being misrepresented because of how he feels we feel as a party?

[Health Research, October 22nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, today is Health Research Day on the Hill. It is a time to celebrate the accomplishments of Canada's health research community and to consider their future goals and needs.

Today I was pleased to meet with representatives of the Council for Health Research in Canada. They emphasized the benefits of research in containing costs and, more important, in improving health. They also shared examples of groundbreaking health research. An example is the international attention that has focused on the Edmonton protocol, where scientists using liver islet transplants have provided new hope for diabetic patients formerly dependent on insulin injections.

It is estimated that this year Canadians will donate $300 million to health research. Many more dollars will be given in contributions through government grants. These are precious dollars and should be spent not in ways that divide Canadians but in ways that Canadians can be proud of.

The Canadian Alliance salutes the hard work and the dedication of those who strive to provide a healthier future for all of us.

[Health, October 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, that did not answer the question at all.

There is a problem and the problem is that smallpox is a real threat in this country. The United States has a plan to inoculate every American within days of an attack. If we were to order today, we would not take possession of vaccine for six months.

Why has the government failed to announce a plan to assure Canadians that it has a vaccine?

[Health, October 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, today we learned of a plan to inoculate 500 first responders in preparation for a smallpox outbreak in Canada. The government has failed to obtain the product to treat the possible side effects of the smallpox vaccine.

It is interesting that the U.S. has ordered 100,000 doses of this product from a Canadian company. Why has the government even failed to order the antidote?

[Agriculture, October 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, we are here tonight to discuss in an emergency debate the disaster that has happened on the Prairies and what is going on in agriculture across the country. I think we need to take a very serious look at that. That is why it is an emergency debate. We asked for this emergency debate last spring. If it had happened last spring, we would actually have been talking about something that would have made a lot more sense in being able to deal then with the crisis that came along, which we could see was going to happen, rather than at this time. It is not too late but it is very late for some. Some have had a devastating summer. Some are in the situation where they have lost everything already.

We have seen this drought on the Prairies. I farm and am very close to the area that is most stricken with the drought. Some of the crops that came up were so pitiful that they were not harvestable. Some of the crops that came up were not harvestable because they were victimized by not only a lack of water or moisture to grow but because of the grasshoppers that ate up everything that did grow.

Actually, now we have another problem. It has started to rain in the last month. Some of the crops in the marginal areas that did get a little bit of rain are now being damaged because of rain and frost. It is an absolute devastation, beyond I think what the people in the House, from what I have heard here, understand. When one talks to some of these farmers, one gets a better picture of what really is happening. We need to do that. We need to understand that so we can help them most effectively.

People in agriculture learn to live with some hardships. It is sort of the way of life. Back in the twenties, 80% of population in Canada lived on farms and raised their families on farms. Now the population has shifted so dramatically that 82% of the population in Canada actually lives in large urban centres and the number of primary farmers is below 3%. Farmers learn to adapt. That is why they have survived to this point. They have lived through droughts before and through grasshoppers, low rainfall and situations where they could not harvest.

The biggest challenge that they face is not any of these. The biggest challenge they face is a government that does not understand, is unknowing and uncaring about what their situations are and has actually challenged them to the degree that they do not even believe that the government is there to support their industry at all. It is absolutely amazing.

This summer when I was in Leeds County and last week when I was in Lindsay, Ontario, I had an opportunity to talk to the people there who understood exactly what was going on. They were the first to rise up, send some of their hay to western Canada and take part in this Hay West project. The Hay West project was a wonderful thing in the sense that it was about farmers helping farmers. They were the first to rally to the cause. They understood the plight of the western farmer, what drought was and what the hardships of agriculture meant to them. They were prepared to give of their own so that others could be helped out in this crisis.

The frustration was that they could not get the product that they were willing to give out of their own livelihoods to the people who really needed it. It was very late in the game when the government finally decided almost out of embarrassment that it would fork over a few measly dollars, I think it was $3.8 million, to send 377 loads of hay to western Canada, which was very much appreciated. The frustrating thing is that this needs to be levered into action by a government that has the dollars to be able to really deal with the problem. The amount of hay on those trains is enough to be goodwill and is very much appreciated, but it is certainly not enough to address the problem in western Canada.

It is absolutely shameful to see the results of that, because we have a government that had the ability this summer to upset farmers on both ends of the country for different reasons, some farmers because they saw the need, wanted to help and had a government that was not willing to support them, and others who needed the help and saw a government that was not interested in stepping up to the plate. We can see that the family farm is threatened from one end of the country to other, but when we look at family farms in Canada we understand a lot better just how important they are.

They provide the highest quality food, the safest products and the cheapest food not only in the country, but in the world. It has been said that never before in the history of mankind have so few raised so much for so little. That is what describes very vividly the picture we see of agriculture and farmers in Canada today.

I was in Wainwright when the first load of hay came in. One had to be there to see the excitement on the faces of the farmers when they understood that somebody was finally there and able to help them. What did they get? They had a Prime Minister who wanted a photo op in eastern Canada. He did not have the nerve to come to western Canada to meet the trains, where he could have seen the same faces I did and understood the plight of those agriculture people. A photo op in eastern Canada was a little bit different and very unappreciated by the people who really needed the help.

I have to sit back and ask myself why a government would do that. Why would a government not understand the plight of agriculture? Maybe it just does not understand. Maybe that is the situation is here. Maybe when the cabinet members got together, they just did not understand.

I sent them a letter inviting them to come to Yellowhead. I said that I would take them around personally to a number of farmers to give them an idea of the plight of the western farmer and to show them how intense the problem really was. I got one phone call. The guy said that he was too busy to come. I had four or five letters. Two of them said that I should not worry about them because they understood the problem. I kind of doubt that. A few letters had lists of things the government was doing for the farmers, basically photo op situations. A few others were signed by staffers saying that their ministers were too busy to show up. That was the kind of reply I got from cabinet members with regard to my invitation.

It is absolutely frustrating when I see a government fail because it is not interested. Government members do not care. They have no plan and there is absolutely no leadership.

I then ask myself why they would do that. We have a government that does the math. It is not very good at helping farmers, but it is very good at math. It understands that 3% is not enough to help. What it fails to understand is that not helping agriculture will devastate our country because it is one of the economic drivers that is absolutely fundamental to the sovereignty of a nation. When a country fails to feed itself, then we have a major problem that drives right to the heart of the sovereignty of a nation.

The United States is one of the most free enterprise countries in the world and we can see what it has done. It has added $280 billion over the next 10 years to support their agricultural industry. We have $5.2 billion. When we compare that to the Americans, their support for their farmers is over 500 times more than ours. That is absolutely embarrassing. It shows us that the government has failed to understand what Europe learned a long time ago. When we go hungry as a nation, we will say to ourselves, “never again”. I would hate to see that happen in Canada. I would hate to see what this government's action will accomplish.

We need to look at cash injections to deal with the problems. We have to look at a five year extension to the tax deferral for ranchers. We have to look at rethinking the safety net programs to make them more versatile so they can deal with some of the problems we have seen in the intense drought area and there has to be flexibility within the program to do that.

We have to look at the dual marketing. We have heard others say that the idea of throwing farmers in jail is not the way to go. We have to understand what their plight is about and what is important for them to stay in their livelihood. We need a lot of these things and more.

It is frustrating for me to see a government that does not understand agriculture in the crisis as we have today. The proof of that is every time I see one of my Liberal colleagues stand up and try to explain to the House all the things the Liberals have done. That proves to me that they have no clue what they are talking about.

[Committee Business and Reinstatement of Government Bills, October 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the amendment and what legislation is going to be brought forward in the next few months, one of the pieces of legislation of concern to me is Bill C-56. We have been dealing with this bill in the health committee for the last 18 months.

I read the Speech from the Throne and I listened to it very carefully. I was particularly struck that there was no reference to this piece of legislation in it whatsoever. It is a very controversial piece of legislation and one that is very important to the ethics of the nation. Whether what it was called was appropriate or not was something that was discussed in the health committee. We dealt with it for a considerable amount of time. We listened to some of the best witnesses when it comes to reproductive technology from across the country and around the world.

Reproductive technology was the name of the bill. At the end of our consultations we said maybe it should not be called reproductive technology because it encompassed so much. It encompassed two aspects. It dealt with reproduction and the true desire of families to reproduce and some of their problems as well as in vitro fertilization and what comes out of that.

On the other side was the ethical dynamic or the related science. This is putting a lot of people in this country in a very uneasy position because of what actually happens when we take life at its earliest and most vulnerable stage and destroy it to create stem cells. The stem cells would potentially be built into another organ and transplanted. That research and its potential is something we have wrestled with.

It is very important that this piece of legislation come forward. There has been a void in this kind of legislation and there has been for 10 years, a decade of the government's reign. We have seen this piece of legislation die on the Order Paper before. We need a political resolve to bring this forward and deal with it in an effective way for Canada because of advancements in technologies that are taking place. Researchers across Canada and in other places around the world say reproductive cloning will be done within the next six months or so. We have absolutely nothing on the books to regulate this from happening in Canada, yet it is universal.

The previous health minister at an international convention in Geneva a year ago last spring said that we need an international consensus on this issue. There is an international consensus and that is that reproductive cloning should not take place.

I am very concerned with some of the things that this piece of legislation deals with because of the complexity of the material. There are two sides to it; it is about reproducing families and also about the science. Canadians have a lack of understanding of the exact dynamics of this piece of legislation. We should look at that and weigh it very carefully.

To bring the bill back in its present form would scare me and Canadians. The bill needs to be amended. It was in the health committee prior to prorogation. If it were to be reintroduced it would come back to committee. At that stage we should be open to some of the amendments that Canadians feel are very important for this piece of very delicate legislation.

The Alliance supports some aspects of the bill. Some of the things in it are actually very good. We support the banning of human and therapeutic cloning, chimera, animal-human hybrids, sex selection, germ line alterations, buying and selling of embryos, paid surrogacies. They are all part of this legislation.

One of the things that is not in the legislation and one that is very important for us to consider is the banning of the patenting of human life. This is something the government needs to deal with. I was looking for an indication in the throne speech on that as well. Are we going to ban human life or are we going to allow life at its most vulnerable to be patented?

When we sit back and think about it, why would we want to patent human life? It would be for no other reason than to protect the individual who discovered it because of an economic value. Patentability is usually based on that. If it is all about economics and it is all about dollars and cents and making a commodity of human life, that is something we should be very careful of.

We are very concerned about this legislation in many other areas. One is the accountability of the agency that would be struck which is talked about in the legislation. To be able to go forward in the 21st century we need an agency that will deal with the very delicate things that are in the bill regarding scientific advancements, some of which we cannot even talk about now because we do not know what they will be, but as we go into the 21st century we know that they are going to be there.

We need an agency that is very strong, independent, transparent, and also which is accountable not only to the Minister of Health but to Parliament. The agency should be an independent agency outside Health Canada. Clause 25 in the legislation is quite disturbing. It allows the minister to give any policy direction that she likes to the agency and the agency has no choice but to follow it. That is not accountability. We need an independent agency that answers to Parliament. That sort of direction would be very difficult for the minister to direct.

The performance of the agency should also be evaluated by the Auditor General, not by itself. The legislation says that the agency will monitor itself. There is nothing in the bill saying that the agency will have to report on an annual basis to the House at all, which is something else that is quite disturbing.

The bill also allows for the creation of advisory panels. We believe that stakeholders in this important area should have been given statutory standing. That statutory standing should be before the agency. We are talking about more than just being driven by scientists. It should be a group that has a broader scope than that.

The users and the children who are born from assisted reproductive technologies should be part of that group. People with disabilities should be part of that group. Scientists and the medical community should be part of it. The faith community, the private providers, research firms, taxpayers and their representatives in the provinces and territories should also have a voice. They should have statutory standing if it is going to have a broad enough scope and if it is going to garner the confidence of the nation as an agency that will move forward in this area.

I was surprised to find that there was no reporting in the bill. As I said before, the agency does not have to report annually to Parliament. That is something that needs to be there for sure.

The agency is going to be called upon to do many things, whether it is to decide upon the number of embryos that are created or destroyed or provide ongoing assisted reproduction procedures. It needs to report on all of those things and it should all be part of that report.

We also have to understand that this agency and this piece of legislation have to work in concert with the provincial governments. Some governments, such as the province of Quebec, are saying that they will not allow embryonic stem cell research in their provinces. What happens under this piece of legislation then? Who calls the shots? Is it the federal government in this piece of legislation, or is it provincial jurisdiction that has the mandate to deal with this area within its facilities?

These are things that concern us about this flawed piece of legislation. When we look at the ethics of this, it is something that is very disturbing to many Canadians.

On one side we have people who will say that embryonic stem cell research is something that could create a cure for their children or for their loved ones. We know that they will stop at nothing to do that. As parents we would lay down our lives easily for our children if we could keep them alive and healthy. It is something that is within us to do.

On the other side of it, there could be embryos created for the purpose of reproduction that would be destroyed. There could be others who would look at that and say “These are my children and I will stand in the way of this legislation to protect those children”.

I understand both sides, and both sides are very right in their dynamics. It is a very explosive piece of legislation and we should think very carefully before we bring it back in its present state.

[Committee Business and Reinstatement of Government Bills, October 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the House leader on the opposite side has tried to avoid answering the questions on Bill C-15B and Bill C-5 that my colleague addressed to him, which are very straightforward. It goes to the root problem of why we are sitting in this place. It is because we are here to make good legislation that applies appropriately across the board to all citizens.

The problem that we have right now and that we have been discussing for half an hour is a democratic problem. When I go into my riding people tell me all the time that this place is dysfunctional and that they feel they have no voice here. That is why 40% of them checked out of the last election. The government is going for a legacy, a legacy of invoking closure or time allocation 78 times. The last government did it 72 times.

Why would the government want to continue that legacy?

[Speech from the Throne, October 2nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, it is difficult to know exactly what is in that throne speech because the words are so vague.

There is some reference to illicit drugs. We all know the problem of illicit drugs in the country. It is acute, regardless of what our friends in the Senate. They perhaps would like to see marijuana legalized. I believe we have a serious problem with illicit drugs, but that was not the question.

The question refers to speeding up the process for prescription drugs. That is something we should take a serious look at because there are some up sides to that in the sense that faster, newer drugs and newer technologies have some benefits.

As we go into the 21st century drug therapies will be much more used than we have seen before. However, if we approve more before we deal with the abuses that are within the system right now, we will be making a terrible error. We have to look after the problem of abuse of prescription medications. It is an epidemic out there. It is something that we have talked about very little in the House and it is high time we started to do that.