Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, like my good colleague Mr. Ramsay, am happy to be back to work as well. I’m losing time on the clock, so I’d better get going.
The overreaching goal of the Conference Board of Canada is to benchmark the quality of life in Canada relative to its 15 peer countries. Most people agree that without good health care, quality of life is severely compromised. On February 12th of this year, the Conference Board of Canada published results on the status of Canadians and their health with their 15 peer countries.
The report is known as How Canada Performs and zeroes in on key health care indicators, and the results are compared across Canada’s provinces and territories as well as other countries such as, for example, the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Australia. The Conference Board is not intending to rank Canada’s health care, although the health care system has an impact on population health. The goal of the report is to evaluate health care status of Canadians and its peer countries.
The report tracks many indicators such as life expectancy, premature mortality, infant mortality, self-reported health status, mortality due to cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, diabetes and suicides.
Overall, Canada earned a B grade on the health care report card, ranking eighth amongst these 16 peer countries. While the overall B grade is good, there is definitely room for improvement. Unfortunately, the Northwest Territories has some of the worst health care outcomes in Canada.
Four jurisdictions in Canada, the three territories plus Newfoundland and Labrador, received the lowest grade of D minus. In fact, the territories scored worst of all compared to other jurisdictions in Canada and the 15 peer countries. Poor health care outcomes among Aboriginal people may be affecting the overall results in the North because of our high population of Aboriginal people.
The Northwest Territories received a D minus in four indicators, ranking worse than the poorest performing peer countries on life expectancy, premature mortality, infant mortality and mortality due to cancer. The NWT also performed poorly on mortality due to respiratory disease, ranking third from the bottom and scoring a D. We only received a C grade when it came to suicide mortality and heart disease and stroke.
There is much more to talk about, but I will have questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services about this terrible, if not dismal report on the state of health care in the Northwest Territories and what we are going to do about it. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
