|
Who says doctors don’t make house
calls?
On February 24, more than 30 CMA
members, including physicians, residents and medical students,
fanned out through the House of Commons to discuss the profession’s
political concerns with members of Parliament.
There was no shortage of issues to
discuss:
-
increasing debt loads facing
medical students and residents;
-
investment in tobacco stocks by the
Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board;
-
concern about human resources
issues within health care and the impact on access to treatment;
-
the international threat posed by
avian flu and other public health threats.
Those issues and many more were raised
during the CMA’s Fifth Doctors in the House lobby day on Parliament
Hill, when the visiting MDs met in groups of two or three with 27
MPs from all four parties.
Dr. Carolyn Bennett, a family physician
and Liberal MP from Toronto who serves as federal minister of state
for public health, told the visitors that lobbying efforts play a
crucial role in today’s politics. “It’s hugely important that we
hear your voices,” she said, and pointed out that because of their
lobbying, physicians “have had a key voice in the rebirth of public
health” in Canada.
The CMA representatives who delivered
messages ranged from President Albert Schumacher to Ashley
Waddington, president of the Canadian Federation of Medical
Students.
Waddington was teamed with Dr. Louise
Cloutier, a Nova Scotia FP who chairs the CMA Board of Directors,
and they made an efficient tag team during their meetings with
Liberal MP Michael Savage and NDP MP David Christopherson as they
deftly switched from issue to issue.
When Waddington complained that the
budget tabled February 23 contained no help for medical students and
residents facing rising debt loads, she found a willing listener in
Savage, who chairs the Liberal's postsecondary education caucus. He
promised to write a letter to Finance Minister Ralph Goodale about
the possibility of deferring residents’ interest payments until
their training is finished.
Cloutier then pointed out that even
though the 2005 budget contained funding to support the licensure of
foreign graduates in areas such as medicine, Canada cannot continue
poaching physicians from countries fighting to retain them: it must
seek a made-in-Canada solution. In terms of issues, agreed Savage,
“education is the next health.” Savage and Waddington then met NDP
MP David Christopherson of Hamilton. “You have a mortgage before you
start to practise,” he said of the debt load facing Waddington and
other medical students, and he said his party supported CMA efforts
to end CPP investments in tobacco companies.
Cloutier also raised the access-to-care
issue, and noted that it could get worse because of the approaching
“perfect storm”: an aging population combined with an aging
physician population.
The impact of the meetings became
apparent later in the day, when Savage told the Commons of the CMA’s
presence on Parliament Hill that day. He also noted that the
association had issued its first public warning on the hazards of
tobacco use more than 50 years ago and urged the government to “take
the necessary decisions” to end investments in tobacco stocks by the
CPP. Earlier that week, NDP health critic Judy Wayslycia-Leis had
introduced a motion in the Commons calling for an end to such
investments.
The CMA representatives were welcomed
to the Hill during an early-morning breakfast by a cadre of Senators
and MPs that included Senator Noel Kinsella, opposition leader in
the Senate, Bennett, Wayslycia-Leis, Conservative foreign affairs
critic Stockwell Day, Speaker Peter Milliken, and Liberal MP Bernard
Patry, a family physician.
Dr. Marilyn Trenholme-Counsell, a
senator from New Brunswick who helped Kinsella welcome the CMA
members to the Senate, had the best line of the day. “This is the
perfect time to ask if there’s a doctor in the House,” she said. |
