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Good evening everyone!

Let me first begin by acknowledging that we’re on the traditional territory of the Musqueam People. Thank you for that wonderful welcome. Appreciate it very much.

Thanks to Dr. Charles Webb and the Vancouver Medical Association for their kind invitation this evening. I am happy to be here with members of Parliament Joyce Murray and Wilson Miao.

It’s an honour for me to be here and it’s an honour to be the first non-doctor guest speaker at the Osler Dinner.

I have deep roots here in British Columbia that have been important to me my entire life. Christmas vacations with my mom and brothers, summers with my grandparents on the North Shore, starting my professional career as a teacher while living here through my twenties, British Columbia will always be my second home.

What makes this province such an amazing place is, of course, the beauty, the ocean, the mountains, the nature, the people, the culture, but also the fact that it always feels like you can see the future from here. British Columbians always strive to be at the forefront of progress. It’s not a coincidence that our first tailored bilateral health agreement was signed with British Columbia last October – a $1.2 billion agreement.

And British Columbia was also the first province to sign a bilateral agreement on Aging with Dignity to improve access to home care, community care, and long-term care.

Premier David Eby has been an important friend and partner on this, along, of course, with provincial Minister of Health Adrian Dix. Thank you, Adrian, for everything you’ve done, not just for health care in British Columbia, but right across the country.

I also have to give a shout out to my old friend John Horgan. John and I sketched out the plan for $200 billion worth of better health care for this country over pizza and beer, one evening in Victoria a few years ago. And that story reinforces that the only way to make progress is by working together.

One year ago, the federal government announced unprecedented investments in health care.

And I’ll get to our specific investments a little later. But first I want to talk about our publicly funded universal health care system here in Canada. For generations, public health care has been a core part of what it means to be Canadian. Here in Canada, no matter where you live or what you earn, you should always be able to get the medical care you need.

This is a choice we’ve made together as a society, and it’s more than just a system. It’s a promise, a promise we make to each other as Canadians. When someone learns that they have cancer, when someone gets into a car accident, when someone is born with a genetic condition; as Canadians, we collectively say, ‘We got you’. We say ‘It’s hard enough as it is to be ill, you don’t need, on top of it, to max out your credit cards or get another mortgage on your house’. Why are we like that in Canada? I think it’s partly because of the weather.

I know, Vancouverites, this might be a stretch, but we’re a vast country with long, cold winters. Yes, more rain than snow here. But you know what I mean. And we learned throughout our history the importance of looking out for each other, of being there for each other. It’s the way we became the best country in the world. We invested in public health care, but also in science, education, and technology. Canada is where open heart surgery was pioneered, where insulin was formulated, and where discoveries are routinely made in the fight against cancer.

A decade ago, my friend Dr. Hedy Fry introduced me to Dr. Julio Montaner. Here in British Columbia, Dr. Montaner and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS pioneered the treatment-as-prevention strategy. This strategy enabled the ambitious global UNAIDS 1999 target to end AIDS as a global pandemic by 2030. You did that here. We did that here.

We have world-class skills, ambition, and knowledge. We need a system that works well, so that everyone can access those advantages. We have to be responsible custodians of the legacy that previous generations built for us.

Our public health care system didn’t happen by accident and won’t continue without effort. Effort by provincial and territorial governments committed to delivering public health care, and effort by the federal government to support it with funding. A year ago, the federal government announced an investment of $200 billion in health care over the next ten years, including planned increases to the Canada Health Transfer and $25 billion specifically for tailored individual agreements with provinces and territories.

These are major, necessary investments, but we all know that money alone won’t fix everything. When you treat a patient, you can give them medication to alleviate their symptoms. But a holistic approach requires looking at the underlying conditions. If you really want to make them better, and that’s what we’re doing as a government. We said, ‘Okay, each province and territory is facing different challenges. Of course, we’ll give them more money, but we also need to work together to drive meaningful changes that will reinforce the foundations of the system for now and for the future.’

When we negotiate these bilateral agreements, we want to make sure that real improvements are made and accounted for, particularly in three priority areas: expanding access to primary care, hiring more workers and reducing backlogs, and improving access to mental health care.

So, to make sure real progress is being made in those three key areas, we’re driving a modernization of how we can share and access health information, as well as rigorous, transparent, and comparable data collection right across the country. Here in British Columbia, we worked with Premier Eby and his team on a three-year action plan.

British Columbia is developing a model of care that will allow health care workers to spend more time with patients.

As Dr. Webb pointed out, British Columbia will recruit more workers to make sure patients have improved access to team-based family health care. As you all know well, the idea of team-based care is for physicians, nurse practitioners, and nurses to work together with other allied health professionals to provide care collaboratively, under one roof. I know you know this in British Columbia, because about 25 years ago, when I was living here, I had an amazing family doctor, Dr. John Mail, who was part of one of the early versions of the team-based model. He mentored many in the science and art of family medicine and has been a true inspiration to many, including to me. Team-based health care leads to better outcomes for patients. For example, it helps patients manage chronic conditions, preventing trips to the emergency room or hospitalizations. It also puts less pressure on doctors, allowing you to focus on the work you do best. We’ve heard time and time again that even for people across the country who have a family doctor, when they see them, they’re harried, they’re overwhelmed, they’re stressed, they’re still providing the best possible care, but the system is under tremendous pressure from coast to coast to coast. We know that close to one in six family doctors in Canada are near retirement age. And according to the Canadian Medical Association, one third of Canadians who already have a family doctor find it difficult getting a timely appointment. So, more team-based family health care is a big part of the solution to support both you, the doctors, and the patients. And I know that the Vancouver Medical Association is totally on board. All of this work around team-based family health care fits within our first two priority areas, which are primary health and supporting health care workers.

The third one is mental health and substance use. Here in British Columbia, the Province will continue to enhance access to mental health and addictions services to make sure Canadians can get access to the mental health care they need. It’s also on all of us to keep making efforts so that people don’t feel stigmatized, by treating addiction as a health issue, not as a criminal justice issue, and by treating people with solutions grounded in science, not ideology.

We need to tackle the wider social determinants. We need more housing and more investments in downtowns. We need the compassion to bring people into the health care system, not to other them with slogans and buzzwords. Mental health. Substance use. These are complex issues. What we need is responsible, evidence-driven solutions by experts like all of you. Solutions grounded in science are so important for mental health, but they’re also essential for women’s health and for care for gender diverse people. In Canada, abortion and family planning are health care. British Columbia knows this because you were the first province to make all prescription contraception free.

And full support for gender identity also requires a health care approach.

We need to listen to you the doctors, the health care professionals, the researchers, and the scientists – always. Care over ideology.

Our three priorities – primary care, supporting workers, and mental health – need to be anchored in better health information and data. Under the agreement, British Columbia will increase the percentage of people who have access to their own electronic health information to 75 per cent in the coming years.

And it aims to increase the percentage of family health service providers that can securely share digital patient health information to 50 per cent.

We need to digitize. We need to modernize. We also need to collect better, transparent, comparable data across the country so that Canadians can see the real, tangible results and improvements their tax dollars are paying for. See, as doctors, you all want to do good work. You want to help people. And you don’t want government funding to get lost somewhere in the bureaucracies. You want these dollars to make a difference on the front lines for your patients. Better data is key to restoring Canadians’ faith in our public health care system.

Here’s the conundrum for the federal government. As we have for decades, we transfer money for health care to the provinces, and the provinces have the responsibility and – quite frankly – the know-how to deliver health care systems to their citizens, in ways that are appropriate for each jurisdiction.

And the federal government can try to explain how we want that money invested. We can put a certain amount of conditions or strings or encouragement, but the federal government is not in a hierarchical relationship with the provinces. The founding of this country separated out different areas of jurisdiction in which the federal government and the provincial governments need to work alongside each other, but in different ways. So, it’s been a constant challenge for the federal government to invest in health care across the country and actually account or demonstrate the investments are resulting in better health care from one jurisdiction to the other.

We signed our first agreements actually with Minister Jane Philpott shortly after getting into office, and we made significant investments in health care and in mental health and home care. You may be well positioned to see across the country whether or not those investments landed exactly as they should have, in places like health, mental health, and home care.

Knowing we needed massive investments in health care across this country to deliver real results for Canadians, knowing that driving better support for family physicians and primary care teams was going to make a huge difference... How would we make sure that that money was spent right across the country on the right kinds of things for Canadians to feel the tangible responses and changes in our public health care system?

And my team got tired of me saying this as I hit them over the head with this for months and months and months, as we were working towards these deals. But the key to me is data. Making sure that what is done in our health care systems across this country is accounted for, measured in comparable, rigorous ways, so that for the first time in the coming years, people are actually going to be able to compare outcomes in one jurisdiction and the next to see who’s doing what well, to see what approach this province has taken or that territory has taken that is worth emulating and why it’s not working in this province or that territory. We have the capacity to collect better data now.

We have the capacity to pull it all together. And it’s not the federal government demanding that they provide us with data. The provinces came together a number of years ago to create the Canadian Institute for Health Information and accountability with high-quality data that can be shared. It’s not about the federal government checking the provinces’ work. It’s about you seeing where the health care system you’re working in is making the right investments or not. It’s about researchers and academics, journalists, and even citizens being able to see where our taxpayer dollars are going and how they’re delivering real results right across the country to demonstrate with the great work done by jurisdictions committed to public health care systems, like here in British Columbia. Demonstrating that it can work, so those areas that are trying to under invest or break their systems can’t hide from the facts that they are failing their systems. They are failing their patients.

So, that’s the underlying strategy or approach that we had as we signed $200 billion worth of commitments across the country over the next ten years. The one condition that I have locked in that is a non-negotiable goal to me is that future governments, as they renegotiate health care agreements, as they create improvements, as they work forward, will do so from a grounding of solid evidence and data that will be transparent and accountable to all. It will change our federation for the better and save public health care for the long haul. Because if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.

The federal government has been very clear. Enhancements to provincial and territorial health funding must seek results-based measures, to assess improvements across all groups. This includes the collection of disaggregated data, which is critical to advancing equitable access to health care, especially in urban areas.

I spoke earlier about the fact that everyone in this country should always be able to access the best possible care, whether you live somewhere rural, remote, or urban. In the bilateral negotiations with provinces and territories, we’re making sure that the voices and expertise of Indigenous Peoples are included. Indigenous Peoples have their own unique health needs. To help address those needs within the systems of provinces and territories, we’re providing $2 billion in funding over ten years for the Indigenous Health Equity Fund, to support First Nations, Inuit, and Métis partners get the best and appropriate care out of provincial systems. But on top of that, here in British Columbia, we’re working directly with the First Nations Health Authority (FNHA), with whom last year we signed a renewed ten-year funding agreement worth over $8 billion.

This funding will go to the FNHA as it delivers and improves the health systems that support over 201 First Nations communities.

The investments I’ve just outlined in health care for Indigenous Peoples, for primary care, for mental health, our agreements with the provinces and territories, all of that, these are examples of what we’ve been doing over the past year alone.

We are rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard work of fixing our health care system. We’re treating the symptoms and the causes. We want our health care system to deliver better outcomes as soon as possible, while at the same time building stronger foundations for the future.

This is a way of thinking you can all understand, and it’s a way of thinking our government puts to every challenge before us. On climate change, we’re lowering emissions and putting money back in people’s pockets while we also make the kind of strategic investments that will position Canada as a leader in the net-zero economy of the future.

On child care, we’re lowering fees for parents, and this allows more women to join the labour market, making our economy stronger in the short, medium, and long-term.

On housing, we’re working with partners to build more homes Canadians can afford, but we’re also removing barriers and creating conditions that will multiply positive results down the line for decades to come.

These are structural changes for a better future. This is our vision and our ambition for Canadians. Everything we do is to secure the promise of Canada, the promise that every generation can stand on the shoulders of generations before and reach even greater heights. And, of course, accessible, high-quality public health care is at the core of this promise that was hard fought by past generations and must be safeguarded for future ones.

We all know that there’s still a lot of work to do. The past few years have been particularly tough for health care workers.

The federal government was there for you during the pandemic, and we’re there for you today.

You know well that the work you do every day saves lives, and that would be more than enough. But more than even that, the work that you do strengthens our communities and restores people’s trust in one another, in our shared health system and even in our very country.

So, thank you for being at the heart of this health care system that is as Canadian as loving maple syrup and booing the Maple Leafs.

You deserve a system in which you can be at your best. You deserve a system that is world-class. You deserve a system that all Canadians are proud of. Well, we want that too. Canada is the best country in the world. So, let’s keep working together to make it even better.

Thank you very much, my friends!