Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank both Ministers for their response. It puts us as legislators in a very untenable situation when you’re faced with these big deficits. Like I said, they haven’t accrued overnight. They’ve been there, as the Minister broke it down for us, since ’05–06. Now we’re just finally going to wipe out $11.5 million of accrued deficit with the stroke of a pen. That’s just at one authority.
To me, Mr. Chairman, the accountability just is not there. Where’s the accountability? Where has the previous Minister of Health been? This Minister of Health is trying to do something. Where was the previous government on these accrued deficits that were building up at this hospital? They knew about it. They didn’t do anything about it. That’s what I want to point out, again for the record. There’s no accountability there. We just take it and wipe it off the sheet: $11.5 million, almost $17.5 million. It’s a lot of money.
The last time I checked, we were in a reduction exercise. We’re trying to run a tight ship here. Well, we’re leaking like a sieve in our health authorities. Let me tell you: we’d better try to fix this. We’d better fix it fast. I’d like to see us come up with a plan on how we’re going to get more control over the health authorities because if they’re leaking like this, we need to ensure we have control and we have some mechanisms in place to allow us to manage the growth there and the cost overruns. It just doesn’t make much sense to me how we let it get to this stage where we can just erase it.
As legislators we’re put between a rock and a hard place because, as other Members have said, it’s the health of the people we represent. We can’t go out there and all of a sudden tell the Stanton Health Authority or the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social
Services Authority they have to cut services and they have to cut programs. That’s just not acceptable to the public we serve. We wouldn’t be looked on favourably in the public eye; that’s for sure. Again, it’s the accountability.
Mr. Chairman, I want to ask the Minister of Health: how many unfunded programs are currently at Stanton and how many unfunded positions? What’s the strategy to address that? In my mind that’s a big part of the problem.