Bill 48: Crown’s Right of Recovery Act
Ms Blakeman:
Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple of additional points that I wanted to make during this at-bat in Committee of the Whole on Bill 48, Crown’s Right of Recovery Act. One of the things that I believe I heard either by the sponsor of the bill or one of the first speakers to this bill was that some of the local anti-tobacco groups were in favour of part 1.
In fact, I had a telephone conversation with Action on Smoking and Health, and that was followed up with an e-mail in which he clarified that his organization has not offered an opinion on part 1 of this bill because, as he rightly points out, criminal justice is not his mandate. Their mandate is, you know, to eradicate smoking and the use of tobacco products in our fair province.
So to have said that they were supportive of part 1 is not correct, and I now have it in writing to support that. Of course, they at the same time supplied me and, I’m sure, every member of the House with lots of information on how everybody else is doing. British Columbia has currently got an appeal going on a court case that they, in fact, started in I think 2005 on tobacco damages and the Health Care Costs Recovery Act.
You know, they were proven right when that went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court denied permission to appeal on August 5, 2007. New Brunswick has also gone through a similar series and in September of 2007 announced that it had lawyers that were being brought together to sue for tobacco-related illnesses on a contingency fee basis. That was filed March 13, 2008, and is ongoing.
So far there are Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador who have commenced actions. I fail to understand and have also failed to get a satisfactory explanation from the government proponents of this bill as to why they included part 1 because it was going to make what should have been clear sailing for a bill, you know, in any number of sports metaphors, a slam dunk to pass with parts 2, 3, and 4 in it.
Whatever possessed them and what was the compelling argument to include part 1? We have failed to hear that argument put on this floor in a way that’s at all convincing to me, anyway. Why they had to make it that difficult I don’t know. I mean, fair enough; Albertans saw fit to put 70 of you people in here. I’m sure you’re going to pass your own act, but the number of problems it creates, I would argue, far outweighs any solution that it was actually presenting here.
The second and related question to this is: where is the government going with this? Now, the minister of health was quoted in some newspaper articles as saying: no, no, no; it stops here. You know, we’re not going to go any further than sort of chasing down criminals to recover health related court costs. He swears that it’s not going to go any further than that, and I go: well, yeah, you said that about a lot of other things that weren’t going to go further, and we saw them go further.
You know, there were going to be a limited number of private clinics, and there’d only be so many health care procedures that would be contracted out, and it would save us money instead of costing us 10 per cent more. There are all kinds of promises that I’ve heard from this government that have just turned out to be absolutely specious. Where are they going with this?
The obvious conclusion is that it’s being put in place so that the government can start to pursue people for medical conditions in their life over which they may or may not have any control; you know, chasing down overeating people to pay for diabetes, denying smokers any kind of surgery or treatment for pneumonia or making them pay for the costs of that. I just think: oh, yeah; go to court and try to prove that this person’s pneumonia was caused by the fact that they smoked for X number of years. What if the person has quit smoking?
I mean, all I can see are a huge number of complications and an awful lot of taxpayer money being paid out to lawyers to argue this in court. Even if it’s lawyers that are on the government payroll, taxpayers are still paying for this, so to me this defies logic. The government has failed to make a compelling argument about why it would stop there. It seems very clearly to have started on a progression of things and has given me no compelling argument, other than the minister saying that it won’t happen, as to why it’s not going to continue on. I would like to see the business case for this.
I would like to see some evidence from other jurisdictions where they have pursued this kind of thing, that this actually pays off for Albertans, that it actually doesn’t cost Alberta taxpayers more money in trying to implement this than whatever costs they think they might be able to recover.
Now, the minister has made the point that, yes, of course they’ll be able to recover money from criminals for health-related costs because not all criminals are poor. True, but I tend to argue – and I bet you we could find some evidence that would tend to say that – that the smart ones are also the rich ones, and they’re probably not the ones that got caught. On the other hand, the ones that weren’t quite so bright are the ones that got caught, and they’re probably the ones that don’t have a lot of money on them. So I think there are other things at play there rather than whether they actually have money or not.
I am still waiting to hear some compelling arguments from the government as to why it has chosen to take this particular route. I think it has just created a huge mess for itself, and I don’t understand why they did it, why they attached this to this particular bill and made something that should have been very straightforward and easy incredibly complicated and now, I think, slower moving.
I’ll take my seat, and hopefully I will hear something from government members as to why these choices were made that would encourage me to support this bill wholeheartedly rather than with a great deal of trepidation.
Thank you.
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