Rob Merrifield

[Pharmaceuticals, May 3rd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, brand name drug companies are routinely abusing the loopholes in the current patent legislation that allow an automatic two year extension of their market monopolies.

Everybody agrees that drug companies should have patent protection, but when patents expire generic drugs should be allowed on to the marketplace without costly court battles or needless bureaucratic delays. When will the industry minister close the loopholes that allow generic drugs to reach the market after patents have expired?

[Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month, May 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the month of May usually means tulip season in Ottawa, but today we are wearing carnations to recognize Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month.

MS is the most common neurological disease affecting young adults today. Each day three more Canadians are diagnosed with this unpredictable and often debilitating disease.

The causes of MS are still not known but research is getting closer to finding some answers. For those who suffer with MS, treatments are available to modify the course of the disease and promising new therapies are being developed.

The MS Society of Canada is in the middle of its spring fundraising campaign and across the country thousands of Canadians will be participating in MS carnation campaigns as well as walks for MS.

I encourage members of parliament and all Canadians to participate and to give generously to this important cause, because together we can find the answer.

[Tobacco Tax Amendments Act, 2001, April 27th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, it is a great privilege to speak to Bill C-26 concerning the raising of taxes on cigarettes.

My position is not an easy one to take. When I consider raising taxes I swallow rather hard. Canadians are hurting desperately because of the taxes they pay, and imposing even more taxes cannot be healthy for the country. However the bill is less about raising taxes than about stopping the use of cigarettes. It is a health matter.

The use of cigarettes in our country has become a serious health issue and it must stop. I have been involved in the health care system for many years. When I talk with my counterparts I understand that one in six patients has a tobacco related problem. Canada has a critical problem with its health care system and cigarette smoking.

However to suggest that increasing cigarette taxes will solve the country's health care woes is misguided and dangerous. It is only one piece of the puzzle. We need to look at the whole puzzle and determine what must be done to change the paradigm and the way people think about tobacco use.

It would be better to ask where cigarette taxes are being spent. If they are not being spent to determine the health dangers of cigarettes then we have a serious problem. We need a game plan that does more than raise taxes because that is not the whole issue. The issue is about stopping cigarettes and the damage they do to the health of Canadians.

We should ask whether that can be accomplished. My father smoked all his life. I look at kids today and think of when I went to school and how difficult it was to discern whether or not to smoke. I was saved because of a basketball team and a coach who decided that if we smoked we would not be able to play. Those were the issues.

Teenagers are very vulnerable. The battle is about who will win the minds of our children with regard to cigarettes: the tobacco companies which are putting more and more nicotine into their cigarettes so they are more addictive, or the government which should address the issue in an educational sense so that teenagers know they are becoming victims rather than exercising free choice.

I believe a society should have free choice and that we should stop victimizing the weak. Someone who starts smoking at age 13 will have spent $15,000 on tobacco by age 30. That is a down payment on a good home or half the price of a good car. That does not even take into account the health effects of smoking.

Tobacco companies in Canada reap $260 million in profits every year from the sale of cigarettes to teenagers. Ninety per cent of those who start smoking do so between the ages of 13 and 20. That is where the battle must be fought. Approximately 28% of teenage girls in Canada smoke cigarettes.

The real question is whether we can win the war. Can we win the battle at that level? Let us look at the example of alcohol. Massive education campaigns have seen drinking and driving in Canada decline dramatically from what it was a couple of decades ago.

We have to be careful when we look at other countries and examine what they are doing. What California has done is worthy of note. It has put the pieces of the puzzle together a little more than we have here in Canada. As a result it has moved its percentage of teenage smokers from 30% down to 9% today. That is a success story that we need to perhaps model ourselves on and improve on, because it is an area that we have to look at.

The whole area of health care is something I would like to address because it is a bigger picture issue. We need to understand that if we are to address efficiencies in health care and sustain a health care system, we have to look at the bigger picture of preventative health. Since the seventies we have been talking about preventative health and yet I see very little effort directed to doing something about it.

The bill moves very slightly in that direction, but we have to recognize that as the baby boomer bubble hits our health care system we have to do more than just add funds to the system and stop the crisis management of health as Canadians end up in our emergency wards or clinics. To start with, we have to look at preventing them from becoming ill. That is something we have to look at in a bigger scheme. To do that we must recognize how smoking impacts our health care system. We have to realize that $3 billion is spent in direct costs for hospitalization and physician time in regard to smoking, and another $8 billion is spent in lost productivity in the workplace. Those are amazing figures.

Labour Canada estimates that it costs between $2,300 and $2,600 more to employ an individual who is a smoker. The rate of absenteeism in the workplace has increased because of it. Life insurance premiums have also gone up. Not only is there a productivity cost due to smoking, but there are other direct costs. These are the things we do not really recognize.

We have to get to the teenaged mind. Teenagers need to understand that not only is it costly to smoke and not only does it stink, and in more ways than one, but there is very little upside to smoking and to becoming addicted to something that will harness them to an addiction they cannot escape. I have talked to a lot of people who smoke. Very few of them want to smoke. Most of them want to quit, for many reasons.

Yesterday I had five individuals in my office. One of them was the president of the Canadian Dental Association. I have never thought about cigarettes and their effect on dentistry. These people came to my office to talk about cigarettes and what they see as they look into the mouths of Canadians. What they see is that baby boomers keep more of their teeth as a result of accomplishments in the dentistry field. However, they are suffering from far more cancers because of their cigarette smoking. Dentists are very concerned with the amount of gum disease and cancers of the mouth that they see brought on because of cigarettes.

I want to impress upon the House how important it is that we look at funding a plan to address teenage smoking. Just raising the cost of cigarettes is not the issue. If we took the money raised and put it into such a plan, Canadians would support it much more.

Here is what amazes me and why I ask the House to implement such a plan. The bill was introduced once before. Now it takes 40 pages to introduce the legislation and 50 pages to explain why. I am a little suspicious. It was introduced in 1998 by the Senate and supported at that time by the health minister. Unfortunately the Speaker of the House did not support it because he felt it was a taxation issue, not a health issue. Obviously this is a health issue and not a taxation issue.

It is a little suspicious to see the turnabout in the minds of the members next to me in the House, because they have to address this as a health issue. I am a little suspicious about how fast this is happening and about what kind of energy is behind it. If we do not address it as just one piece of a very large puzzle, then we will have missed our opportunity.

The House needs to examine it as not just a taxation issue but a health issue, one that has to be addressed in our country. We cannot fail in this one. We owe it to our teenagers and to the next generation. We owe it to them to sustain our health care system.

[Hepatitis C, April 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, three years ago this week the Liberal government turned its back on thousands of Canadians who were poisoned by blood tainted with hepatitis C. On April 28, 1998, the Liberals voted no to a motion which would have extended financial compensation to victims poisoned beyond the years of 1986 and 1990.

Thousands of victims were let down by the federal government. Among those who did qualify for compensation, many have yet to see a dime. Joey Haché was one of those individuals. Joey was in the gallery that fateful day three years ago and he is here again today to register his protest. Days after that vote Joey was advised that he qualified for that compensation. Three years later Joey is one of thousands who have received nothing.

Joey is asking “Where is the compensation that was promised?” and thousands of other hepatitis C victims still want to know “What about us?”

[Health, April 23rd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I hope it continues as well. However he cannot pass the buck on to the provinces alone. The federal government was part of the problem and it has to be part of the solution.

Accessibility is one of the five principles of the Canada Health Act. The federal government is responsible for working with the provinces to ensure Canadians have adequate and good access to health care professionals. Waiting will only make this situation worse.

Could you tell Canadians what you are doing about this problem today, and is it more than what you have just said?

[Health, April 23rd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians do not need 18 months and a $15 million royal commission to recognize that there is an acute medical staffing shortage.

Federal funding cutbacks in the 1990s have led to massive layoffs of health professionals and decreased enrolments in our medical schools. Now Canadians are paying the price for that lack of foresight. The shortage of doctors, nurses and technicians are only expected to get worse.

Will the government wait behind the cover of the Romanow commission, or will it take immediate action and help increase quotas in our schools by this fall?

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of different ideas about how reform should happen in this place. We have talked a lot about them and we have heard almost all of them today. I could get into the details of that one and many more. I would prefer to keep my focus exactly on where I think we should start.

Where we should start is the free vote. We should start with being able to do what our constituents want us to do and that is to vote their will in the House. If we did that, then we would bring meaningful debate into this place. Right now we do not have that. I have not seen it. We can get into all those other details, but I would rather not because I want to keep my focus on where the fundamentals are and then work from there.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the question. I would just like to explain that in the time I have been here, in the time that I have witnessed, I do not have to go back very far to see that what the hon. member is saying about free votes has been stifled very significantly. I just have to go back one day, because yesterday we saw many of the backbench Liberals vote against a bill that they honestly believed should have been there. We know that from witnessing it on agriculture, as he may have believed.

What I am suggesting is that the free vote is a place to start. There has been a lot of good discussion here today and I appreciate all of it. I agree with the hon. member that there are some very good ideas about parliamentary reform. I also believe that it has to start with the free vote. If we did that, it would pave the way for everything to flow out of it. That is what I am suggesting.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we are having an interesting debate today and it is absolutely vital for me, as a new member in the House, to be able to speak to it.

The House of Commons, as far as I am concerned, has to return to the people of Canada. Parliamentary reform has taken far too long and is long over. The rights and responsibilities of members of parliament to represent the views of their constituents has disappeared. The government seems much more concerned about maintaining power than representing the will of the people.

The House of Commons is the people's parliament. It is the voice of the common people of Canada. We must make it responsive to the people of Canada.

I took my seat here only a few short months ago and I have already come to recognize, despite the efforts of hard-working individuals from all sides of the House, that this place is no more than a voting machine. Last night I witnessed 16 motions being voted on in a few minutes, rubber stamp laws that were mainly drawn up by unelected bureaucrats from the Prime Minister's office.

It is up to the members of parliament, the government and the opposition to take parliament back. We must take parliament back.

I came believing that I could offer some constructive input on pressing legislation and engage in serious debate on important issues. Instead, I saw an example yesterday of where we turned our back on a very important issue, an economic fibre of our country, the agriculture crisis. Many members were not even allowed to debate on it. However, we can go all night tonight on this one.

The mechanism of government was inherited by a proven British parliamentary system created by the Fathers of Confederation. They answered the great question: Should the chief power of the country be the king or parliament? They determined that they would be governed by the people and not by the will of one man. It is an illusion if one thinks that Canadians live in a democracy. We are controlled by the Prime Minister.

My grandfather fought in both world wars. He went to war defending the rights of democracy so that we could stand in the House today to debate. He fought for freedom. Young men and women, aged 18, 19 and 20 years old, gave up their lives so that we could be here to debate. It is sad for me to think that the people of Canada have been conquered by a dictator without a shot being fired.

We can change that by free votes. We can work toward reforming parliament. There are a lot of things that have been talked about today, all of them very worthy of note, but for me the greatest change would come with the free vote of every member in the House, because it is up to us to vote the will of the people who sent us here.

Have governments forgotten that only four short months ago the citizens of the country elected each one of us into our seats? In four short months we have forgotten who we represent. We need to shift how government works and to be responsive to those who put us here.

As I see it, we are bribing Canadians with their own tax dollars, and there is wasteful spending on unnecessary programs and unaccountable government. Cabinet is barking to the tune of the bureaucrats and special interest groups. Free votes will set us on a path for parliamentary reform and that is a path that we need to get on really quickly as far as I am concerned.

A real interesting concept is that government members believe that if the government introduces a bill that is defeated or if an opposition bill, motion or amendment is passed it would bring down the government and they would have to resign. It is beyond me where that idea comes from. It is archaic.

The Prime Minister coerces backbenchers into believing that voting the will of the constituents would bring the government down. That would not bring the government down at all. Voting for their constituencies and constituents would make the government stronger and Canada stronger.

Liberal backbenchers have been forced into something that the Prime Minister wants. He has been bullying them around, sort of like a schoolyard bully, but bullies are only powerful as long as no one stands up to them and no one really challenges them or thinks around their bullying.

I know that the hon. members across the way are truly hard working people. I have talked to many of them. Now is their chance to stand up. Not many of them but a few of them are in the House right now. They can talk to their colleagues and do something for Canada that is beyond anything they have done to this point.

There are 301 members elected to the House of Commons. We have the power to implement change. We set the rules. We were entrusted to make the laws of this country. I am not asking members to vote for something they do not believe in, but I will not be holding my breath that the Prime Minister will come through that door any time soon, unmuzzle the backbenchers over there and allow free votes in this place.

As democratically elected members of parliament, we do have the power to make the change. We could make it as early as tomorrow morning, if we had the political will to do so, by passing a motion that we truly have free votes in this place. All it would take is 30 Liberal backbenchers to live up to their potential and to influence government in a way they have never influenced it before. That is all it would take. We could change Canada and never go back. That is how easy it could be.

I do not believe in blaming the bureaucrats. I believe it is our duty. We need to do something about it and we need to do it soon. Backbench MPs have that potential to be more than just voting machines. I would challenge them to do it, to be more, because they owe it to themselves and they owe it to this country.

I am proud that I can represent the people of Yellowhead who have chosen me to be here as their representative in the House of Commons. They trust me to inform them of the problems, seek their opinions and vote their will. After being in parliament for only a few months, I have already realized that my ability to represent my constituents has been hampered by the Prime Minister's obsession for power. If he were really interested in creating the legacy he talks about, he would implement parliamentary reform himself. However, we do not have to wait for the Prime Minister. We can implement it now. We have the power to do it and we should.

Right after the election of November 27, 2000, I came to Ottawa with a few MPs for orientation. They were from all sides of the House. We were excited. We had just been elected. We had just been given the opportunity to change Canada, to lead Canada, to make a difference in this country. I was excited about it and I am still excited about it. As I talked to the other MPs, they said they were excited about the concept of a free vote. They thought it was something they could and should do.

It is interesting now to see how disappointing it is that they have fallen victim to the system and have thrown away their ideals and their principles. If these walls could speak, they would tell us about the great leaders who have sat in these same chairs and who have fought for a better Canada, who have done what was right for their constituencies.

I am calling on every member of the House to live up to the vision of the founding fathers and to vote for a motion to allow free votes, because members owe it to this country. It is the greatest country in the world and we need to protect it. We can do it and we should do it now.

[Nursing, March 15th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we must make Canada the first choice of our graduating nurses. Canada has become a subsidized training ground for U.S. hospitals.

Recently the Globe & Mail featured a series of articles on the brain drain of thousands of nurses headed for greener pastures south of the border. An estimated 20,000 Canadian nurses are working in the United States today. At least 10% of our graduating nurses and hundreds of experienced nurses have headed south annually. The crisis will only get worse.

Estimates show that Canada will be facing a shortfall of 113,000 nurses within a decade. Stressful working conditions, rising tuition and the brain drain are all contributing to the growing nursing shortfall.

With this critical shortage, it is small wonder that Canadians lack the confidence in the future of our health care system.

The lack of foresight by the government has caused this crisis. The government must acknowledge the crisis, take some immediate steps to prevent dangerous future shortages and implement a long term plan to keep Canadian health care professionals at home.