44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 16, 2023 10:00AM
- Feb/16/23 12:17:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we are learning about Veterans Affairs' mental health rehabilitation services treatments being outsourced to a company owned by Loblaws.
My good colleague from North Island—Powell River has been calling on the government to deliver that through Canada's health care system, not privatize it. Meanwhile veterans, people who have put their lives on the line, are not getting the services and treatment they need and deserve.
Does the member think that this privatization of veterans' services should be included in the health care system for Canada and Quebeckers rather than outsourced, where profits are actually flowing to investors while veterans wait for services? It is absolutely absurd. It is unconscionable that the government is doing this.
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- Feb/16/23 12:19:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, today we are talking about health care, something that Canadians value.
Our health care system is the very backbone of our social safety net, no matter who we are, how much we make, where we live or in what circumstances we may find ourselves. It is the core value that Canadians right across the country praise, and it is at risk today. There is an insidious and nefarious project under way in Canada that would seek to take away that very protection.
It has already begun In my home province of Alberta. The premier of Alberta is utilizing existing public funds to funnel into the private health care system, funds that would otherwise be used for public care. This cannibalizes our existing public health care system.
It is a fallacy, a myth that the private health care system can make things better. It is no secret to the many Canadians who had to put up this fight before, including the New Democratic Party, which has always been steadfast in the defence of our public health care system, that the provinces would seek to defund and take away the supports of our public health care system. This would ensure that the public would begin to see that deterioration, which would build public support for private health care systems. That is what is happening right now. Our public health care system is falling victim to a classic privatization trap, whether with respect to education or health care, that would seek to destroy our social safety net.
I look at my home province and the real people who have been saved through public health care. The fight began and grew on the Prairies. The intent of the Canada Health Act was to ensure that no matter who we were, whether it was the neighbours we farmed with, or the post office person, or the teacher or the person constructing our roads, and regardless of how the economy may have hurt us, we would have that basic level of humanity.
It is not the job of the government to look solely at the GDP of the country. It is important it ensures that the people who develop the means and the surpluses to make so much possible in our country have control and benefit from those surpluses. Part of that is ensuring that the basic need of health care is looked after.
Imagine our country seeking to seize on Danielle Smith's project to give everyone $375 in an account to privatize the health care system in my province. If that were implemented that right across the country, millions of our most vulnerable people would be left behind.
As evidence of this, Premier Danielle Smith published a paper at the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy, where she suggested creating annual health co-pay fees of up to $1,000 annually based on income.
She has stated that once people get used to the concept of paying out of pocket for more things themselves then “we can change the conversation on health care.”
It is shameful that she would want to shackle the most vulnerable, who need health care the most, to a limit of $1,000. We know that it costs at least $3,000 for one night in the hospital. Who does she want to toss out onto the street? Who does she want to ensure does not get that care?
On top of all of that, the condition of our hospitals today is truly deplorable. Before we get to the point of proposing a solution like Danielle Smith's, we have to break the system first. We have to break public health care. That starts with attacking our public health care workers and our care economy.
The brave men, women and non-binary folks who work in our health care system today are the same people who helped us through one of our country's worst nightmares, the global pandemic, which would have left millions of Canadians behind if we did not have a public health care system.
Even though health care is massively underfunded, and the conditions these workers were placed in, they stepped up. The House praised them. The Conservatives, the Bloc, the Liberals called them heroes.
When I talk to health care workers in my province today, they feel like zeroes, because that is what they are getting at the bargaining table and in their contracts. When we value our health care professionals and those who work in the profession, we value our health care system. These people are not looking for profits. They are looking for the tools to help their neighbours, their family members, the people they grew up with and the provinces they love. However, the conditions they are working in are forcing them into a narrow corner. They have to make a decision to either leave the health care system altogether or enter a growing private sector that would seek to abuse them, that would seek to take away their rights and that would seek to take profit from those who are sick. It is a shame.
Alberta can be a prosperous, beautiful, strong and resilient place so long as we ensure that the principles we have agreed to in our provincial health bill, which is our public health care system, are truly adhered to and valued. Part of that is looking back at that history and at those who experienced the health care system before it became a socialized system.
I talked to a retired nurse in my riding. Just last weekend said asked me to please stop the privatization of health care. She knew exactly what that felt like because she had lived through it before. In Alberta and other provinces, before our national health care program was built, and is still being built and defended today, she had to go through the onerous process of having to ask someone to insure her husband's life. When she could not afford to make those payments, the insurer said “too bad, so sad”. Her husband needed insulin and medical attention. Her husband worked on a farm his whole life and was a hard worker, and there are realities to that kind of labour. When we do not provide that social safety net for those who rely on it most, we leave them behind and it hurts our economy.
We need to take a stand against U.S.-style for-profit health care, and that is part of the problem. We have megacorporations that would love to dine out on the public dollar, that would love to continue to make a killing off people who need that support.
Our job in this place is to ensure that Canadians have the tools and the social safety net to succeed when they fall down, because we are all human, so they can get back up. Canadians are fighting for that today. That is the progress New Democrats are fighting for today, a truly universally accepted public health care system that can withstand the labour conditions we put on individuals who give themselves to our country and who find themselves lesser for it; and a government that is not willing to ensure they have that health care. It is for those teachers, so they can ensure that no matter what happens to them, especially throughout COVID, they can continue to do the work of standing on the front lines.
The working class of our country are being divided and they are being attacked, and it is being done so we do not look at the real problem. Those corporations that would seek to profit, and the politicians they pay for, ignore this issue. They want us to ignore the fact that our public health care system is under attack. They want us to ignore the fact that for-profit surgeries are already taking place in my home province of Alberta.
The Liberal government needs to enforce the Canada Health Act. It is written clearly. It needs to do that and ensure that people like Danielle Smith cannot continue to finance the private health care system like she is today. I welcome the Liberals to Alberta to take a look at some of the private health care systems, because they obviously do not believe it. They should talk to the people who need this service. They should talk to them about how much it costs to get a hip replacement.
We are here to defend public health care, and we will continue to do that.
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- Feb/16/23 12:29:39 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for taking such a firm stand in this place for publicly funded, universally available and equitably delivered health care in our country. It is so important that we continue to stand up for it because he is right. There are Conservatives in the House and across the country who would strive to privatize our health care further.
However, our plan is compliant with the Canada Health Act. It ensures that provinces and territories abide by the Canada Health Act. The member said precisely that our government should enforce it, and I have a few small examples.
In Ontario in 2021, a deduction was taken from Ontario's federal health transfer for charges that were privatized in nature. The same is true for New Brunswick as well as in the member's home province of Alberta. These deductions are the enforcement mechanism that the federal government to enforce the priority. This government has repeatedly stated that our health care remains public and universal.
If the member has any other recommendations, I am here to listen.
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- Feb/16/23 5:08:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and speak to today's NDP motion about privatization and the health system. It would accomplish two things. One is the substantive denunciation of privatization and the false narrative that somehow this is an innovative solution to the problems of our health system at the moment, or at any time for that matter. It is also a motion about accountability and holding the Prime Minister accountable for statements that he has made. He ran in 2021 denouncing the then Conservative leader who was talking about privatization as innovation and then recently lauded the Conservative premier of Ontario for privatization and called it innovative himself.
If we want to see the right kinds of outcomes from the government, accountability has to be part of that. It is natural and good in this place to hold people to account for the things they have said, particularly when Liberals contradict themselves. That is especially true in the case of the Prime Minister, who ought to be providing leadership in this moment on the health file. In my opinion, he cannot do that adequately unless he is a champion for public delivery of services over privatization. That is the accountability bit and why this is an important part of the motion.
On the substantive issue, one of the main reasons why it is really important not to encourage further privatization within the system is because it is not a solution to the problems. The overwhelming problem in our system right now is the lack of health human resources. That is an issue of training and education, frankly. It is about trying to mobilize Canadians who either do not have a career yet and are thinking about what career they are going to move into or contemplating a change in career and figuring out how we train them in order to do all of the various jobs within the health system, whether it is being a doctor, a nurse, a personal support worker, a health care aide, an RPN or an LPN.
The point is that we need to get more people working in our health care system. Setting up private clinics to compete with the public system for the people who are trained and are able to do those jobs is not going to solve the problem. It is just going to shift people around between different places within a system that is already starved for people. If private clinics somehow had a magic sack full of health care workers that they could just draw out like rabbits out of a hat, that would be one thing. That would be great. That would mean more people in the system and we could talk about terms and conditions, but we all know that is false.
We know that the people who are ultimately going to pay for the education and training of those people who are going to work in the private clinics is the public. Therefore, the public should have a right to avail themselves of the services of those very same people in the same institutions, not an institution for people who can pay for quick access and then a public system that is starved for talent and people due to private clinics paying more because they are accepting patients who can afford to pay more. That is the dynamic that is set up as we allow for more and more private delivery of services within the Canadian system, and that is why we are here to denounce that today.
It is not true that privatization is innovation. That word is often abused when we talk about health care. I think of the Conservative government in Manitoba under Brian Pallister and then Heather Stefanson, who talked about innovation. What did that mean for people in Elmwood—Transcona and northeast Winnipeg more generally? That meant that the Concordia emergency room got closed. That meant that the Transcona community IV program was shut down. That meant that the satellite cancer care clinic in northeast Winnipeg, run out of Concordia Hospital, was closed. That is what they call innovation.
It is not a coincidence that they call that innovation and they also call privatization innovation, because it is closing down services like that and refusing to do the hard work of setting up training programs to have an adequate number of health care professionals to deliver the services that people need. The Conservative governments then come in and say that we now need to privatize because it is not working. First, they close it down, then they starve our educational institutions of an adequate number of seats to train the folks that we need. Then they say it is broken and the only way to fix it is to call our buddies who are doing business in American health care and invite them across the border to come do it here.
That may be innovation from their point of view, from a profit-making point of view, but it sure as hell is not policy innovation when it comes to serving people well in their own communities in the way that Canadians have come to rightly expect, which is to not be greeted at the emergency room door and asked to see their wallets, but to be asked to see their health cards.
That is the way it should be. If we are going to preserve that in Canada, we need to focus the conversation at government levels. That includes the federal government in its role as a funder and the provinces in their roles as deliverers of health services. We need to be talking about how we meet the needs within the system.
The biggest, most pressing need right now is for more people who know how to do jobs to keep ERs open and in order to have access to primary care. We know that is the best investment because it allows people to take a preventative approach to health care and not be treated at the ER, but to be treated in a community clinic where it is cheaper for the system overall and ultimately better for people's health.
That is why the motion is important. It is important because it calls out the false narrative of innovation through privatization that we hear about far too often without any evidence that it actually works. It is also important because it is about holding the Prime Minister to account for the promise he made to Canadians in the 2021 election. Unfortunately, it seems he is going back on it.
Canadians will remember when the Prime Minister made a clear electoral commitment to electoral reform in 2015. He turned his back on that. We are not going to let him do it on health care. That is what today's debate is all about.
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