QUESTION PERIOD — Health
Funding for Primary Health Care
June 1, 2022
Honourable senators, my question is for the government leader. I’m going to return to the issue that I didn’t get to fully articulate yesterday regarding the government’s broken promise to provide $3.2 billion to the provinces and territories for the hiring of 7,500 new family doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners.
According to the B.C. College of Family Physicians, almost one million people in my province alone do not have a family doctor and are unable to get one — one million. Earlier this month, the Canadian Medical Association said the lack of access to family doctors is a growing crisis, and it urged all levels of government to address the issues that are “decimating primary care across the country.”
Leader, I will try again to ask, why did the NDP-Liberal budget fail to include this specific promise to fund 7,500 new doctors and nurses starting this fiscal year?
I don’t have a specific answer to your question and I won’t repeat the more general answer that I gave. We must remember not only that health is a provincial jurisdiction, but the federal government has played a critical role in financing and helping provinces develop and fund their own health care systems.
It is up to a province to organize how it wants to use the resources from its own taxpayers and as provided by Canada, and to prioritize within the medical schools and the licencing organizations how that will work. There are market forces also at play in terms of the penury of family physicians. It is not only in your province; it’s a problem in my own and everywhere. Provincial governments have done good and not-so-good jobs in rationalizing their resources with consequences sometimes unforeseen.
I will make inquiries about your particular question, but it remains the case that the Government of Canada remains a strong financial partner to all provinces to help them shoulder the increasing costs and challenges of health care.
As I’m sure you know, some Canadians who don’t have access to a family doctor will ultimately seek care at a hospital emergency room. This past weekend, three hospitals that serve smaller communities in different parts of B.C. closed their emergency rooms due to staff shortages. These types of closures are becoming a common occurrence.
On Monday, the mayor of Clearwater told CTV that their local hospital emergency room has been closed so many times in recent months that he can’t even keep track of the number of times this has happened.
Leader, does the NDP-Liberal government have any timeline for when it intends to fulfill its promise of 7,500 new doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners in Canada? And how did you determine that 7,500 was an adequate number?
Again, I don’t have the answer to the specific question and I will make inquiries. Most provinces, in their demands for additional support for financing, insist that it be done with no conditions whatsoever. We know from reviewing the ongoing discussions between the provinces and federal government, whether it is in the area of funding for physical or mental health, that there is an ongoing tension between the Government of Canada’s desire to target the money to address pressing needs that we can all identify, whether long-term care homes or mental health support, and the province’s desire is to say, “This is our jurisdiction, give us the money and we’ll spend it as we wish.”
Without speculating as to why agreements have not yet been reached — in this particular case, between your province and the federal government — I assure this chamber that I will make inquiries, but I think we all must remain sensible and sensitive to the actual realities of federal-provincial financial negotiations around health care.
