44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 8, 2021 02:00PM
- Dec/8/21 9:02:35 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Vancouver Kingsway.
I would like to start with a simple little question. Has the minister received his mandate letter?
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- Dec/8/21 9:03:11 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I want to inform the minister that I am my party's health critic.
It is 79 days after the election and 43 days since he was appointed, but the minister has not yet received the statement of priorities of his mandate. How does he explain that?
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- Dec/8/21 9:03:52 p.m.
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Madam Chair, the election was supposedly necessary and urgent. For those people watching us who do not know, I want to make it clear that it is the Prime Minister who sets out the new ministers' priorities in their mandate letters.
The Minister of Health claims to know what the Prime Minister expects of him, so it would be great if he could table his mandate letter in the House soon after he receives it so that we, too, can find out what his priorities are.
Having said that, has the minister seen the Standing Committee on Health's work on the pandemic?
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- Dec/8/21 9:04:55 p.m.
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Madam Chair, the throne speech was so empty we had a hard time understanding anything about the government's priorities other than its plan to interfere in areas under provincial jurisdiction.
Since the minister avoided answering my question, I have to assume he is not aware of the work of the Standing Committee on Health. If he were, he would have known that all the experts confirmed that chronic underfunding, thanks to his government and its predecessors, made the health system so fragile that, when the pandemic hit, all the weak links snapped.
Dr. Champagne from Quebec's association of hematologists and oncologists said, “we really need to be concerned about these [diagnostic] delays, because patients and society will pay the price. For 13 of the 17 cancers that were studied, a four-week delay in diagnosis increased the risk of mortality by 6% to 8%”.
The pandemic has created two types of victims: COVID‑19 patients and other patients. The latter are collateral victims. Why is the minister failing to see the urgent need to increase health transfers from 22% to 35%?
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- Dec/8/21 9:07:09 p.m.
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Madam Chair, the minister says he wants the pandemic to end as soon as possible, but does he know that at the end of the third wave the lack of cancer screening meant that 10,000 people went undiagnosed? Does he know how many patients were waiting in the middle of the third wave according to the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec, the FMSQ? I would like to note that we have reached the fifth wave.
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- Dec/8/21 9:08:05 p.m.
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Madam Chair, once again the minister is sidestepping the question.
The minister wants to impose standards, but he does not have the answers to questions about what is happening on the ground in Quebec. There are 200,000 patients waiting, and some are past the recommended wait time.
The good Dr. Legault, of the FMSQ, said that it will take at least 10 years to clear the backlog. He stated, “The federal government quickly allocated significant funds to cushion the impact of the health crisis on the economy and on the public. We hope that the federal government will be able to provide additional funding to the provinces” to “address the needs of the health care system”, whose sustainability he believes is at risk. He added that “this crisis will not go away in one year or two. It will persist for a long time.”
Does the minister realize that the longer his government waits to invest and transfer money to health care, by which I mean the $28 billion that everyone has agreed is necessary, the more health care costs will skyrocket and the more patients will suffer?
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