Helena Konanz

Not analysed yet

A requested analysis is usually ready within half an hour; come back to this page or reload it.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of the residents of Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay to speak to Bill S-5. I am always honoured to speak in the House for my communities. Bill S-5 is an act respecting the interoperability of health information technology and to prohibit data blocking by health information technology vendors. I am pleased to speak to this legislation as a member of the Standing Committee on Health. It has been a great honour, in my time in the House, to provide oversight of our health care system. Canadians are proud of our health care system, and for good reason. However, most Canadians and most members in this House agree that it needs improvement. There are many issues, too many for me to even list here, that we are addressing in our committee. To name one, the Canada health transfer has risen substantially, yet access remains poor. In fact, the Canada health transfer increased from $37.2 billion in 2017-18 to $57.4 billion in 2026-27, a 55% increase in nominal terms. Despite this increase, Canadians are still waiting longer for several priority surgeries and diagnostic tests than before the pandemic. Canada continues to rank poorly, internationally, for timely access. Younger Canadians face particularly poor access to primary care. In 2023, more than one in four Canadians aged 18 to 34 did not have a regular health care provider. One in five Canadians aged 35 to 49 lacked a regular health care provider. We have a gateway system in our health care, and it did work for quite a long while. However, it does not work unless Canadians have a health care provider or a family doctor. Canada ranks last among 10 peer countries examined for timely access to care and, of course, the lack of that initial provider is one of the reasons. In 2025, the C.D. Howe Institute analysis ranked Canada 10th out of 10 countries for timeliness. Again, I know everyone in this House who has had to wait in line or bring a loved one to a hospital for any kind of testing would not question that data. Only 86% of Canadians reported having a regular doctor or place of care, and just 25% can see a doctor or nurse the same day. In the communities that I represent in Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay, it is not 86% that have a doctor. I know a lot of these stats are different for rural communities like mine that have a severe lack of family doctors and specialists. Thousands in Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay right now have no family doctor. Forty-seven per cent of Canadians waited two months or longer for a specialist, and 59% waited two months or longer for an elective surgery. In 2024-25 at least 23,000 patients died in Canada while on wait-lists for surgeries or diagnostic scans. We have to wonder if that number is even accurate because there are a lot of people who might not be included who died of other issues they were having while waiting. It is hard to know if it is even much more than that; I am sure it is. Emergency rooms are under significant pressure. In 2024, 1.2 million emergency department visits, or 7.7% of all reported visits, ended with the patient leaving before being seen and assessed by a physician. Canadians are spending longer in emergency departments. In 2024, half of emergency patients waited just under two hours for an initial physician assessment, while one in 10 waited more than five hours. Of course, some of this can be attributed to what we are talking about today and the issues that Bill S-5 is trying to solve. One in 10 patients waited more than 14 hours in an emergency department overall. That is a 28% increase from 2018. Hospital capacity is contributing to extreme delays for patients who need to be admitted. In fact, in 2024-25, one in 10 admitted patients waited more than 36 hours for an in-patient bed after the decision to admit them had been made. That is a 45% increase from 2018. Surgical and diagnostic waits remain worse than before the pandemic. In 2024, only 68% of hip replacement patients received surgery within the 26-week benchmark. That is down from 75% in 2019. Only 61% of knee replacement patients met the benchmark, down from 70%. The most important thing is there are people behind the statistics. There are people who are extremely active, who want to stay active, who do not want to go into a home and do not want to be a burden to their families. They cannot get that hip surgery in a timely manner. They cannot get that knee surgery. They want to continue to play tennis, to play pickleball, to go running, to go walking on trails, and they cannot because they are in extreme pain for months. It is really not fair. Let us go to MRI waits, which are 15 days longer right now than they were in 2019, while waits for CT scans are taking three days longer. The Standing Committee on Health is studying these wait times currently. Knowledge is power and the more we know exactly what is going wrong compared to other countries, the more we will be able to resolve this problem. Waits for specialist care and treatment remain lengthy. The Fraser Institute 2025 physician survey reported a median 28-week wait for referral by a family doctor to receipt of treatment. Again, I believe those numbers are even higher in rural areas that have an even greater shortage of specialists. Canada spends heavily on health care and continues to struggle with access and capacity. Among the 31 high-income countries with universal health coverage, Canada ranked third-highest for health spending as a share of GDP, but 27th of 30 for the availability of doctors, 27th of 31 for MRI machines and 28th of 31 for CAT scan machines. These are things that Bill S-5 would address. Being able to communicate is one of the issues, obviously, with Canadian health care, and that is why I do support much of what is in this bill. It attempts to improve our system by making our health care data accessible beyond our own home province. We are travelling more within the country now. We are buying Canadian, we are travelling Canadian, and we are vacationing Canadian. We need to be able to cross provincial boundaries, into any province, and if there is any kind of situation where we need to see a health care provider, which of course happens all the time, we need them to have our information available, to know, as my colleague mentioned, whether we are allergic to any kind of medication or need some operation, and to know what is happening at home with our home doctor. If we cross provincial boundaries at this point, there is no information available most of the time. We are exploring our great country. We are hiking the Rockies north of the border or we are heading for Montreal instead of Palm Beach now. As more Canadians are exploring the country, they will need to interact with other provincial health care systems. Re-injuring an existing injury or refilling a prescription has become more common. People across our country move between family doctors, community clinics, hospitals and diagnostic labs, yet in far too many cases, their medical history fails to follow them. Systems remain trapped behind digital walls and information remains fragmented. We cannot allow provincial silos to limit our medical services in Canada. Obviously, this runs counter to the spirit of the Canada Health Act and to our health accords. Again, there are people behind all these statistics. The number one thing is that we need to keep the Canadian people healthy. I represent one of the country’s eldest regions. Our communities are also full of young families, alongside many recent retirees and long-time residents. Generations of wisdom are always on display, and we are fortunate that so many Canadians from every province choose to make Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay their new home in their golden years, but as they bring their cherished mementos, they can also bring complex medical histories, long-term prescriptions, diagnostic scans and test results. Seniors should not be made solely responsible for ensuring that their medical history is properly updated with local health care professionals, not in a country where our health care is supposed to be universal. I can give two examples in my region that illustrate this need. Penticton Regional Hospital recently lost its entire staff of neurologists, even though our region is home to more seniors than anywhere else in the country and it is one of the eldest regions in our country. Neurology is a vital service to ensure seniors’ aging brain and nervous system changes are properly screened, cared for and managed. The loss of these neurologists will mean more seniors will have to travel further for screenings and speak with neurologists many hundreds of kilometres away about the care they received in Penticton. If they need to go to another health authority for specialized screening, it is not always guaranteed that they would be able to see the testing history from their former hospital. We all know that this is true, because sometimes we can drive from one pharmacy on one side of town to another pharmacy on the other side of town, and they have no idea what prescription we are on. If these seniors go to another province, and I have spoken with residents who have seen specialists in Alberta, their data is not available. Similarly, the emergency room in the town of Oliver, has seen sudden, random closures repeatedly over the past few years, more than 40 times, or almost once a week in a calendar year. I would like to take this time to thank the former mayor of Oliver for his service over the past eight years and for sitting as a witness before the Standing Committee on Health to talk to members of Parliament about what it is like for a small community to have their emergency room close randomly, sporadically, multiple times a year. It is more than 40 times a year. I thank Martin Johansson for the service he has given to our communities and for putting those first. Let us remember that, when a small community like Oliver’s emergency room closes randomly, it has a domino effect throughout the whole region, because not only is it an emergency that needs to be attended to, but the other hospitals these people have to go to will get extremely backed up. I have received so much mail about the health care system, so much mail and so many calls about how broken the system is. I am going to read a short letter from one of my constituents, Marie-Louise, who says the following: “I am writing to express my concern about the lack of timely medical care in the Emergency Hospital in Penticton. “In the Similkameen—South Okanagan this sad situation is not new.... “Unfortunately, long delays in seeing a doctor can leave all patients, and especially parents of babies and young children, frightened, helpless and anxious.” When a person goes to the hospital’s ER, prompt attention from a doctor is expected and needed. Marie-Louise continues: “This happened to our family on Monday of a long weekend. We had our three-month-old baby granddaughter go to the emergency room. The doctor came in to see the baby 3 hours later, and she came after the shift switch. Meanwhile the baby had arrived 3 hours earlier and apparently the emergency room was fairly quiet on that early morning. “These delays in seeing the doctor in due time are not new. “These delays are not acceptable....” This is especially true with a three-month-old baby. I want members to think about the stories of Canadians who check in at one ER in one province and are dismissed, only to end up in the care of another hospital in another province with a checkered history at best of what prior tests were done or of any prior observations by doctors. In its current form, Bill S-5 is intended to address the concern that many electronic health records and health IT systems cannot easily communicate with each other because of data blocking. Data blocking is when health IT vendors restrict access or the exchange of health data to protect market shares or extract licensing fees. This is not acceptable. We cannot allow big tech to act as an armed bandit when it comes to accessing health care records. Other jurisdictions have moved to prohibit this practice, and I am glad we have the opportunity to do that right here. Getting health data right is not something for computers. It is for patients. It is for the people. It is for Canadians. This means fewer duplicative tests and fewer bad diagnoses made with incomplete information. It must mean making Canada’s 13 different health care data systems able to connect to one another and not be at the mercy of health tech companies setting costly and artificial restrictions on Canadians’ most sensitive information. In other words, legislation must be a win-win for those working in health care and those who need health care. I do want to say, as a member of the health care committee who helped lead the investigation into the PrescribeIT scandal, I can say with some expertise that allowing Infoway to handle the regulations for shared health care records would be a costly and futile disaster for taxpayers, patients and doctors. Even our health minister has agreed that this agency needs an audit as soon as possible. We are waiting for that audit. Infoway should not be put in charge of this new program. Basically, I would like to say I believe the minister knows it is not fit for that—