Cancer, mental health and national health strategies

The position

The argument was that Canada had a cancer plan already written, agreed by the provinces and by every major cancer organisation in the country, and that what was missing was money and the will to implement it. He made a parallel argument about heart disease and mental illness, which had no national plan at all, and he put all three in a single motion. That is why this page covers all three: they were one argument, not three.

The motion and what followed

On 7 June 2005 he moved an opposition day motion under the Business of Supply. An NDP amendment adding territories and municipalities was accepted, and the motion as amended carried 231 to 53, with the government’s own members voting for it and only the Bloc Quebecois opposed. The authoritative record, including both divisions, is the Journals of the House for that sitting.

A supply motion expresses the will of the House. It does not appropriate money or legally bind the government, and he treated it accordingly by pursuing it. The next day in Question Period he asked when the funding would arrive. On 4 October 2005 he moved a motion at the Standing Committee on Health urging implementation and funding, and it carried nine votes to two in a committee the governing party controlled. Two days later he resisted an attempt to reframe the study as one about chronic disease generally.

After the 2006 election the incoming government committed funding to the strategy in its first budget, and in November 2006 the Prime Minister announced the creation of the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, an arm’s length organisation established to implement it. Fletcher, by then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, reported both to the House.

One third-party assessment is worth recording as such. Speaking in the House on 27 November 2006, Diane Ablonczy said his advocacy “led to a commitment to fully fund the Canadian strategy for cancer control.” That was her characterisation, made by a colleague, and this page presents it as her view rather than as a finding.

Mental health

The mental health strand of the same motion has its own history. He had argued the case in fiscal debate in February 2005, in the line that best captures it: mental health as the estranged cousin of the health care system. In September 2006 he demanded an apology from two members who had mocked ADHD across the floor of the House, calling it a serious question of children’s mental health. In October 2006 he released the federal report “The Human Face of Mental Health and Mental Illness in Canada” on behalf of the Minister of Health. He raised mental health in committee five times between 2006 and 2008, including on suicide among young Indigenous people.

In 2006 he received a Champion of Mental Health Award from the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health.

This is a concentrated chapter rather than a career-long file. It runs from his appointment as health critic in 2004 to his departure from the health portfolio in 2008, and the page does not suggest otherwise.

In Steven Fletcher’s words

One passage is best read as a record of the argument he was having in 2005 rather than as medical language. Resisting the reframing of the cancer strategy at committee on 6 October 2005, he said: “Cancer is not a chronic disease; it is a deadly disease. To mix it up with the chronic disease strategy completely diminishes the will of the House of Commons.” The point he was making was about a bureaucratic reclassification, not about oncology; many cancers are today managed as chronic conditions.

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.