44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 29, 2024 02:00PM
- May/29/24 9:02:52 p.m.
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I am going to ask all members to please take a moment and pause. Let us get back to the proper way of conducting ourselves in this place, with decorum and respect for each other.
The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.
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- May/29/24 9:03:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, while I talk about a very serious issue about what a Conservative premier did under the common-sense banner in Ontario and what it led to, which is the deaths of seven people, the Conservatives are heckling me and laughing at it. That is what the public should know.
As before, I will not ask the Speaker to limit the minister's time to the length of my question.
Does the minister share my concern that the common-sense Conservatives could very well end up going down the same path Mike Harris did in the 1990s?
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- May/29/24 9:03:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, yes, I do share the concern the member has.
My friend and colleague points out that we have seen it a number of times. In fact, Newt Gingrich also talked about common sense and brought in some of the most disastrous criminal justice reforms that have ever been visited on the United States. He himself afterwards said that it was the greatest mistake of his political life and a dreadful mistake.
It is a terrible thing, when the world is complicated and difficult and is going through as much as it is, to pretend that there is a magic wand, as if all we have to do is take away people's carbon rebate and all the problems of the world will go away. That is the only solution I have heard from the other side. The Conservatives talk about cutting government spending, but they will not say where. We know they will not support dental care. We know they do not support pharmacare. What else are they going to cut?
The major investments we are making in health care are absolutely critical for making sure that our public health system is there for everybody. If we do not have a public health care system, what we wind up with is two tiers of care. The private system will go after the most profitable care, will go after the care that makes the most money, and the public system will be left with the most expensive care. It means that not only will care get more expensive, but those who are left and can only afford the public system will get deteriorating care. There will then be a migration of money and talent from the public system.
That is what we have seen all over the world. I have told this story before, but it bears mentioning again because it really reflects the question of what kind of country we want to live in.
I had the opportunity a couple of months ago to go away for the weekend with my partner. When we were down in the United States, we saw a man collapse. He had some sort of health event that caused him to fall to the ground unconscious. We went over to his side and called 911. When he came to and we told him not to worry because paramedics were on the way, his concern was not for his health; his concern was for how he was going to pay for his health. His concern was that he did not have enough money to deal with the health emergency in front of him. We could say that this is an American-only problem, but we have holes in our system we are trying to fix. We have diabetes patients who are saying they cannot adhere to their diabetes medication.
I will go one further. I met with Dr. Mehta in Scarborough. Dr. Mehta told me he has patients whom he tells, “If you follow this regime of taking your medication and eating the right foods, you're going to stay healthy.” He asked why he is even working as a doctor, because the people in front of him cannot get medication and cannot adhere to it. It means they are going to wind up with a cardiac event or stroke, or they are going to go blind or lose a limb. To me, that is not acceptable. Those are the consequences in front of us.
Either we step forward and continue to fill those gaps to make sure we are preventing bad outcomes or we use “common sense”, which is to pretend snake oil and these solutions of slogans, which are nothing more than the sentences that are tweeted, are going to fix the complex problems we have. We have to meet the moment we are in with real solutions that are going to provide answers.
I am proud that we have health partners and health ministers across the country we can work with. They are putting aside the partisanship and saying, “Let's get it done.” I wish we had an opposition party that would do the same.
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- May/29/24 9:07:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to something that I heard the minister say earlier. I think it stems a bit from what he was saying toward the end of his first answer.
He said something very interesting. He said that observing a problem is easy; it is easy to see a problem. Dealing with a problem and coming up with solutions that require work is something completely different.
Can he expand on that?
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- May/29/24 9:08:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I believe it was Teddy Roosevelt who observed that many people sit on the sidelines and cast criticism, and he noted how easy that is to do. It requires no talent or ability to sit from the sidelines and cast criticism, or to mock or attack those who try to make things better.
I think it is owed to every Canadian that every member in the House stands in their place and offers solutions. I can tell members that when it comes to health care, I have heard nothing. The only thing I have heard from the Conservatives is what they will not do. They will not do dental care. They will not do pharmacare. They have not said what they are going to do with the investments we are making elsewhere in the health system in mental health and other areas. What is their plan for those who are uninsured? What is their plan for those who are in need? What is their plan when 70% of chronic disease and illness in this country, most of the things that fill our hospitals, are preventable?
They have no plan. Their only plan is to criticize our action, to phone around and hope they can stop a dentist from participating so we do not get the political credit of a senior getting dental care. Then we wonder why people get cynical about our profession. This should be a place where we debate solutions, where we have, lined up against each other, two plans to make things better in this country.
Their way has been tried. It's the idea of trickling things down, cutting taxes for the most affluent and crossing our fingers for everybody else. We recognized that Adam Smith's invisible hand was not enough. We learned it sometime around the 1800s. We need social safety nets. We need strong health care. We need to make sure that as people are competing and participating in our marketplaces, they are not allowed to fall through the cracks. That does not happen by doing nothing. It does not happen by cutting. It happens through hard work and the courage of action.
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- May/29/24 9:10:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on the topic of pharmacare specifically, one reason it is so critically important is that if we are going to have a health care program to support people and take care of people when they get to the hospital, which is part of the health care programs throughout the country, we may as well be taking care of them in the preventative stages. If we, as the minister alluded to, set up programs to help people take care of themselves, such as pharmacare and getting them access to the medicine they need, we can avoid having a lot of people end up in the hospital.
Likewise, when we look at these particular programs, we know they are not being fully used. A lot of people, especially seniors, up until recently, because they did not have access to the medicines they needed, may have been making very difficult decisions about whether they should take half the dose they were recommended instead of the full dose because they can save a bit of money there.
Can the minister explain and touch on why it is so critically important to make sure that people are taking the full doses they are prescribed, rather than trying to find ways to save money by reducing their doses?
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- May/29/24 9:11:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is one of the most heart-wrenching things in the world. I can go back to my time at the Heart and Stroke when I headed its Ontario mission. I was the national director of children and youth, and I would see folks who had heart attacks and strokes because they did not have access to their diabetes medication and were not following a proper regime. As I mentioned, it can lead to all kinds of other terrible outcomes.
Adherence to these medicines is essential for their health. It is also essential as a matter of cost reduction. It is extraordinarily expensive to allow somebody to get into a catastrophic state. We need to get out of the business of crisis management in health care. We need to be up the stream preventing these things. The Public Health Agency of Canada has done extraordinary work, but we need to do a lot more work on prevention. The future in this country is avoiding illness before it ever happens and making sure that people live long, healthy and full lives by avoiding illness and disease and keeping our hospitals empty because the services are simply not needed.
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- May/29/24 9:13:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will split my time three ways.
Fair Price Pharma is a company that got 15 kilograms of imported heroin licensed by Health Canada at some point. Has the minister met with the CEO, Perry Kendall?
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- May/29/24 9:13:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have not met with the CEO, but just to be clear, we have not granted a licence to Fair Price Pharma. It has not even applied.
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- May/29/24 9:14:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is in possession of 15 kilograms of imported heroin as a result of a licence that was granted by Health Canada. Just to be clear, has anybody in the minister's office met with Perry Kendall?
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- May/29/24 9:14:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have not met with Perry Kendall.
I will say again that Fair Price Pharma has not applied for a licence, nor does it have one.
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- May/29/24 9:14:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, has anybody in the minister's office met with Perry Kendall, yes or no?
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- May/29/24 9:14:40 p.m.
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- May/29/24 9:14:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, has anybody in the office met with representatives from Fair Price Pharma?
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- May/29/24 9:14:53 p.m.
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- May/29/24 9:14:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the lobby registry says that on September 15, 2023, representatives from the minister's office met with Fair Price Pharma. Can she tell the House if that is true or not?
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- May/29/24 9:15:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, to my knowledge, no one from my office has met with Fair Price Pharma.
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- May/29/24 9:15:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, does the minister have any idea what is going on in her office and who has met with Fair Price Pharma?
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- May/29/24 9:15:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, to my knowledge, no one on my team has met with Fair Price Pharma.
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- May/29/24 9:15:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is an Order Paper question for the government, so either the government is not being forthwith with the House or the minister has no idea what is going on in her office.
Has anybody from her ministry met with any representatives from Fair Price Pharma? I do not know how long we will have to do this for.
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