Rob Merrifield

[Public Health Agency of Canada Act, May 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I have heard the Bloc member ask that question of other members on this side with regard to jurisdiction. I would suggest to him that it is not the province of Quebec, the province of Ontario or any other province that has the jurisdiction to deal with airports. Importing and exporting people to and from Canada comes under federal jurisdiction, which is why the Quarantine Act is federal legislation.

One of the problems we had in dealing with SARS was when it came to jurisdictions in dealing with a pandemic or potential pandemic. It is not that we should be threatening or that a province should feel any threat that its jurisdiction is being trampled upon. The bill does not do that at all. It actually complements what is happening in the provinces. It would help them to prepare, deal, train and monitor what is actually happening in the province so that there can be a seamless system and a system that is dealt with, not only at the airports and the public health agencies within the provinces, but that they are all working together as a team.

That is the Canada that I believe in, the Canada I believe we need and that is the way we need to deal with a pandemic, whether it is nationally or internationally. I would encourage my colleague to not be so protective or so phobic about provincial jurisdiction because I do not believe the bill or the agency would contravene anything that is happening in the provinces.

[Public Health Agency of Canada Act, May 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I have the greatest of confidence in Dr. Butler-Jones. I think my hon. colleague was very instrumental in choosing him. Not only did we have great respect for him when he appeared before committee, but some of the best conversations I have had with him were actually at the airport because we fly an awful lot and we usually sit and chat for a half hour or more when we get to the airport. I believe he is doing a very credible job.

My argument is: Why did it take so long? It was almost a year and a half after the SARS outbreak before the actual appointment of a chief medical officer.

With regard to the first nations, they do have serious problems. We have $9 billion to $12 billion a year of federal money going to reserves where we have third world conditions. I believe this gets to some of the root of the problem. It is leadership. Somebody has to play quarterback, not only in a SARS situation, where we saw no federal leadership at the time of SARS, but the same sort of thing has to happen with first nations. I believe we need some strong leadership on and off reserve to ensure we streamline the activity with preparedness for any kind of a pandemic or potential pandemic on those reserves.

I cannot answer directly what is actually happening at this specific time. I just know that there has to be some strong leadership. I have a great amount of trust in not only our Minister of Health but also our Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development to give that leadership and to ensure things are being dealt with on reserve. I have a lot of confidence that is going to take place.

Dr. Butler-Jones would have to be the person who answers the question as to exactly what is happening on those reserves with regard to public health, as he does with preparing front line workers, nurses and doctors right across the country. I am assuming that is being done. I am looking forward to the health committee starting so we can have reports, ask those exact questions and get more thorough answers.

[Public Health Agency of Canada Act, May 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, this is my first opportunity to speak in the House in this new session. I want to say again just how much of an honour and privilege it is for me to represent the wonderful people of Yellowhead. I cannot acknowledge it enough. I am always in awe of the awesome responsibility they have given me and the honour I feel in representing them, so I stand to proudly represent them.

I also want to say how important today's piece of legislation is. As we are speaking about it today, I want to lend my voice to some of the consideration of the legislation as it goes through the House. I want to talk about why I think it is important.

I have talked about this. We have seen exactly what has been going on with regard to this legislation. It has been an order in council since 2004 and now we are actually bringing it into the House in order to put it into legislation. It comes out of Canada's SARS experience. As well, I will talk a bit about the possible pandemic of the avian flu and whether it is or is not.

Let us get to the agency itself and what we are really talking about. We are basically talking about prevention and how we prevent health crisis situations from happening. In Canada in the last 40 years, our experience has been more about looking at crisis intervention. When there is a health crisis, people usually go to hospitals or doctors and try to find an intervention to somehow alleviate the crisis. This is not necessarily about doing that. This is about doing something before that happens.

Not only do we have to look at public health with regard to a potential pandemic or something like a SARS infection, but we have to do that in all of our health considerations, whether it is cancer, heart, diabetes or arthritis. There has been tremendous advancement in the things we can do in the area of prevention before we get into a crisis situation. If we are going to sustain our health care system in the 21st century, we are going to have to begin to be very serious about being far-sighted with regard to the health of ordinary individuals in Canada.

When it comes to this agency and protecting the public health side of things in Canada, we go through monitoring, testing, analyzing, intervening, informing, promoting and preventing until something actually happens unexpectedly, just as we saw recently in Toronto and Vancouver with the SARS situation. When we realize that a good part of what actually happened there could be prevented and that it can be very costly if it is not prevented or dealt with, then we realize that we in the House have a responsibility to do everything we possibly can on behalf of Canadians to prepare them for those situations.

This was brought home with what happened after SARS. The Kirby report talked about it, and many have talked about the Kirby report, its implications and what it recommended. It was also followed with Dr. Naylor's report, a national advisory committee report on SARS that specifically talked about what we could learn from that disease. This is what has come out of that. It is a recommendation that we actually do something with regard to prevention so that not only can we talk about the federal government and its responsibilities, but we can also understand the responsibilities that provinces and territories have with regard to this whole area of preventing individuals from getting into these crisis situations and what we can do to protect ourselves and prepare ourselves for what might be coming.

I want to spend a minute or two talking about the SARS situation, because there is a lot we can learn from what has actually happened. I want to discuss it because the Naylor report talked a lot about what the province did and what the federal government did not do. I would like to explain a little of what the government's responsibility was at the time and what perhaps did not happen.

Before SARS happened, it was Canada that actually exposed it to the world when it realized what was happening. The virus was present in Asia, in China in particular, and it was actually Canada's surveillance that alerted the World Health Organization to the problem.

It is interesting to note that Canada alerted the World Health Organization, and yet when there were two cases of SARS, one in Vancouver and the other in Toronto, they were handled completely differently and had completely different results. Officials were alerted to the case in Vancouver because the individual came from Hong Kong. All hospitals in Canada were supposedly aware of this infectious disease. In Vancouver, it instantly was treated as an infectious disease. Because of that, there was not one death, because of the way the hospitals handled it and intervened at that time.

I am not blaming the medical people at all for what happened in Toronto. I understand full well what happened. The point is this. When SARS was diagnosed in the Toronto hospital, it took medical staff 24 hours before they really understood what they were dealing with. With everything that flowed out of that 24 hour period of time, there were 44 deaths in the Toronto area. The World Health Organization put a travel advisory on the Toronto area and as a result of individuals refusing to travel to that city it suffered an economic loss of $2 billion. That was the fallout.

We can see that the timing and the way we prepared in those two cases was absolutely critical to the fallout with what actually happened with regard to human deaths and economic costs.

So why is it so important to show leadership? Because, in regard to leadership, one area reacted differently from the other. I am not blaming anyone. I am not saying that anyone was at fault. I am saying that what we should do is learn from the experience and, in this agency, understand that preventing this from happening again is critical. We should be aware of the fact that many experts around the world claim that another SARS or another pandemic is going to happen in the future. This is very valuable. What we are doing prior to this is actually critical.

No country in the world should be more prepared and more understanding of what is actually going to happen than Canada. After all, we had SARS in our country. It left another nation and came into our country. Because of that, we saw a human toll and an economic disaster. It was when the World Health Organization recognized that we were also actually guilty that we realized Canadians could have potentially transported this virus to the United States, Australia and perhaps other countries in Europe, so the World Health Organization had no option but to put out a travel advisory.

What was our responsibility in the House at that time? Our responsibility was where our jurisdictions lay. First of all, importing and exporting and individuals arriving in Canada or leaving Canada fall under federal jurisdiction. At the time of the SARS outbreak, I had the privilege of being the senior health critic for my party. I have always seen health care as a non-partisan issue. We should approach it in a non-partisan way. We can go and play politics with other issues, but when it comes to health care, we should not. We cannot afford the time. We cannot afford the economic costs. We certainly cannot afford the political fallout from it.

In that case, I wanted the then minister of health to understand the importance of SARS and to take an aggressive approach in dealing with it. Before question period, I told the minister what actual question I was going to ask her in the House. I wanted her to reply in a way that would throw some light on the situation and push her toward a leadership position. I have never done that since, and it was the first time I did. I did it because SARS breached all political party lines. I was disappointed with the results I got when I saw what the provinces were doing.

The member for Parry Sound--Muskoka, now the Minister of Health, was the Ontario minister of health when the SARS outbreak occurred. He took the lead on SARS. When the travel advisory was put out for the city of Toronto, he actually went to Geneva to fight it, to say that the travel advisory should not have been put on Toronto, and actually, the travel advisory was placed on Toronto after SARS had been contained and controlled in the Toronto area.

As it was not the federal minister of health who acted in an aggressive way, in a quarterback way, we saw the disconnect between the federal responsibility role and the provincial responsibility role. Therein lies the reason that we absolutely need to get the lines of communication straight. We need to do everything we possibly can to ensure the Public Health Agency and the Chief Public Health Officer have clear directions and guidelines set out as to what should happen and who should be in charge if this were ever to take place again. We know that it probably will. It is just a matter of time.

I mentioned earlier the avian flu. We had some experience with what we thought might be the avian flu in the lower B.C. mainland, in the Fraser Valley area where we had to eliminate a number of poultry because of it.

There is good news and bad news on the avian flu side of it. The bad news is that in 2005 we had 95 cases worldwide and 41 deaths. However, since January 2006, and we are only a third of the way into the year, we have had 61 cases and 37 deaths worldwide. We have seen the avian flu actually spread into Europe, into Africa and into Asia Minor. Most of the world has experienced some of what is potential in this virus. The experts are telling us that we are very close to receiving it here in North America. We know it is spreading.

What we do not know is whether the virus will mutate into a pandemic. The experts are divided on that. It has been around for a couple of years. Some of them say that a virus never sits stagnate. It is always mutating and when it is mutating it could easily trigger to mutate between human to human contact. If that were to happen we would be sitting in a potential pandemic situation. That potential is always there and it is escalating as times goes on.

Another group of scientists are saying that the longer this virus is out there and it has not mutated the less chance it actually will mutate.

I am not trying to raise alarms, other than to say that there are things we know and there are things we do not know. The thing we know is that it is spreading. The thing we do not know is whether it will be the next pandemic. However we had better be prepared in either case. Therein lies why it is so important for the bill to pass. We can debate it in the House and try to fine tune it as much as we possibly can so that we are prepared for whatever might happen.

A perfect example of this happened in the health committee last year. Some of my colleagues who sat on that same committee are here in the House. It was when the avian flu and the pandemic began that the Tamiflu was said to be the anti-viral that could help prevent and actually cure individuals with avian flu and we had a glut internationally of wanting to acquire the Tamiflu. The pharmaceutical officials came to the committee and we talked about Tamiflu and whether we were prepared. The Chief Public Health Officer was there and we were able to discern whether or not we were doing the appropriate thing. At least we had some experts who we could go to be able to discern as parliamentarians whether we were as prepared as we could be for what might or might not be transpiring.

As it has turned out, we have some Tamiflu in Canada. Whether we have enough or not we could still debate, but whether it is actually a product that can do the job if the virus mutates is another question. We know that if the virus mutates, the Tamiflu may not work at all.

Nonetheless, we have a professional, the Chief Public Health Office, in case something like this happens. The number one advantage of having a medical officer who is an expert is that he is not a politician. The last thing we want in a crisis situation is anyone who has a political bent. In saying that, we must understand that the responsibility of the federal minister of health is to be able to deal with the situation and deal with the agency.

It is important to have someone who is a professional in the health field because it puts the public's mind at rest knowing that a professional, whose area of expertise is medicine and not politics, is dealing with a potential pandemic. It gives me comfort knowing we have Dr. David Butler-Jones who has his mandate to follow this internationally and nationally, is able to educate our doctors and front line nurses, and is able to make teams of individuals prepared and ready to deal with a pandemic if and when such an event were to happen.

The agency would do more than just prepare us for any kind of a potential pandemic. It also would be looking at chronic diseases of all kinds. We now realize that chronic disease is the number one cause of death and disability in Canada. We need to do whatever we can to prevent and stop the progress of these chronic diseases. This leads us into the physical environment in which individuals are involved. We know that 60% of the determinants of the health of the population relate to physical environment as well as the social and economic environment. These are areas that we should not overlook and the agency will have the mandate to deal with them.

We could get into the specifics of the agency and talk about whether it should be inside or outside Health Canada but what we need to have is an agency that is focussed on its mandate. We do not want to take a shotgun approach or water it down in any way, shape or form. It is a wise way for the legislation to go forward, which is for the agency to be outside of Health Canada, that it deal with its mandate and, specifically, that it be able to communicate with the population in case of a very serious situation. I am very much in favour with the way this has been drafted. It is the right way to go.

It is important that the agency report directly to the minister. I look forward to annual reports coming back to the Department of Health because it is important for this body and the politicians who are here to have public responsibility and public reporting of what that agency is actually doing and whether we are preparing the country for what may or may not be happening.

The legislation is long overdue. SARS hit in 2003, a long time ago, and, thank goodness, it was not the pandemic and that we have not had one since. We have had some time but there is a striking difference between the past government and what we are seeing in how we actually bring this forward because it is all about leadership.

Later today we will be introducing our first budget but this legislation that is now on the floor will be driven through very quickly. I am looking forward to committee where we will be able to flesh this out to see if there are any problems with it in any other way and then to move it on and enact it as soon as possible, giving our confidence to Dr. Butler-Jones, our Chief Public Health officer, because this is very important for us to do. It is important for us to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we and all Canadians are prepared and this legislation would do all of that and more. This is the beginning of an exciting chapter in the history of Canada and it prepares us well for the 21st century and beyond.

[RESUMPTION OF DEBATE ON ADDRESS IN REPLY, April 24th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my question concerns foreign aid. The member talked about poverty in the world. I think Canadians are a compassionate group of individuals.

I had the opportunity of representing my constituents in Africa last September. Eight or ten different countries came together to try to discern how to apply the funding Canadians gave to Africa for relief for poverty and HIV-AIDS. We visited some HIV-AIDS hospitals and talked with some of the NGOs.

There is no Canadian alive who would not dig deep into their pocket to support those individuals. The problem is how do we ensure that the money for relief measures, including poverty, gets to where it is needed.

This leads to my question regarding the former government's policy and direction concerning money going to foreign relief. How do we ensure that those dollars get to where they are needed? The former government's policy was that all the money would be applied through the governments. Many of those governments are quite corrupt.

Let us not put it that way. Let us put it another way and talk about our first nations people. Nine billion to twelve billion dollars go to first nations people, yet we have third world conditions. We see a bureaucracy that becomes weighted. Somehow we have to get over that.

Would my colleague tell us how his party would apply those dollars directly to where they are needed, and not necessarily going through governments but through NGOs?

[Agriculture, April 6th, 2006]

Mr. Chair, my colleague had a lot of facts with regard to biodiesel and ethanol. This would be a great move in the future. This would give agriculture not only the short term bounce it needs to get through the difficult time it is in right now, but it would also provide a brighter future than what we have seen in the past. We have heard a lot about that in the debate tonight and it is absolutely critical.

I know quite a bit about agriculture. I have lived it going on 50 years. We have a fourth generation farm which our oldest son has taken over. I could probably be accused of child abuse for a thing like that considering the state of agriculture right now.

There is a bright future in biodiesel. Also, there is the idea of getting rid of trans fats in Canadians' diets. This would drive another market. It is really important when getting rid of trans fats that they not be replaced with highly saturated palm oil fat. It is a great opportunity for the canola industry in Canada to have a 7% saturated fat instead of a 50% saturated fat. Canola could fuel another market the likes of which has never been seen before. We have to take a serious look at this. Lots of studies have been done. As health care has been my portfolio, I know we would save $1.9 billion per year in health costs alone if we did this as well. This is something we really need to do. It is a win-win situation for everybody. I wonder if my colleague agrees with me.

[Supply, November 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his question because it begs another question. He asked me whether it is worded properly, but I would say the question is this: why do we need to have it at all? When honourable people act honourably with the public purse, this is not needed. What we have is a government that has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar.

He talked about some of the foundations. He mentioned those to which he did not think this should apply, but he forgot to mention those like the Mint and what we saw with the affair of Mr. Dingwall. He did not mention Canada Post and what we saw happen at that foundation. He did not talk much about his sponsorship responsibility and the sponsorship scandal. He has not talked about a gun registry that went from $2 million to $2 billion. He has not talked about the HRDC scandal that went to $1 billion. On and on it goes.

The reason we need to have some of the responsibility and accountability is that the government has inappropriately handled the public purse. My hon. colleague should be ashamed of himself. He should stand up and apologize to Canadians and he should not be saying that he does not know if he likes the wording of this one and cannot actually support it because it is flawed in its language.

I think it is right in its intent. The only reason that it has to be there is that the intent is to deal with the problem of corruption within a Liberal government that has to be defeated. I believe the electorate of Canada will understand that full well and will deal with the Liberals at the appropriate time.

[Supply, November 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to the motion to amend the Access to Information Act.

I want to come at this one from a bit of a different angle. I have listened to the debate all afternoon. The minister was up a few minutes ago talking about whether the committee did or did not do its work, and committee members tried to challenge that.

I want to get back to why this needed to be brought to the House at this time and debated. Why are we discussing this amendment, when it could have been done long before this time?

I congratulate my colleague from Regina--Lumsden--Lake Centre for bringing the motion forward because it is important. It focuses the House on one of the big problems we have at the present time, which is accountability and transparency of the government. It is one of the reasons why the government is on its eleventh hour, or maybe a little beyond that, of its reign, a very short one as a result of Justice Gomery's report on the sponsorship scandal. It is all fresh in our minds and will continue to be fresh in our minds because it is so important.

The report laid out the facts which showed this was something that happened under the government's reign. It set up, ran and used the program to move money from the public purse into the Liberal Party of Canada. This was a theft of millions of dollars from the public treasury. It set up a culture of entitlement.

The government has had four consecutive wins. I guess if there is a lesson there for Canadians, it is that we should not leave any government in office too long. If this is what happens, that is not in the best interest of the public. Woe to our country if we give it five wins because it will send the wrong message. It would say that what the government has done is okay.

The electorate will have a choice. It will either condemn the actions of the government or it will condone it. A vote for the Liberals will be complicit. It will say that it is okay to be corrupt. I do not believe that reflects the values of Canadians. I think the government is about to learn that lesson. I would implore every Canadian to think very soberly. It is not about whether they grew up under a political banner of the Liberals, Conservatives or the NDP. They need to understand what is at risk in this election, which is the democracy on which our country was founded. We need to stand and protect that.

We just went through a Remembrance Day ceremony where we honoured our veterans for going to war and risking their lives to secure the democracy and the rule of law and justice. Yet we see it eroding before our very eyes. We in the House, where we come to protect and promote it, have seen that eroded. I see members of Parliament from all sides of the House failing to stand and fight to continue the battle to protect our democracy. This is very important. The amendments that have been brought forward shine the light on the lack of accountability and transparency by the government.

One thing that really amazes me is we have a motion before us, we will vote on it and if it passes, how many members in the House feel the government will act on it. I can think of votes in the House giving direction to the government of the day and the government has totally ignored them. That not only shows the amount of corruption, but it shows a lack of respect for the democracy of the land and for the will of the public, by extension through individual members of the House.

Some of these motions have been pretty significant such as the hepatitis C file. I remember when that came to the House. It was an issue we had been fighting for many years. It was a directive by the members of the House of Commons to the government that those individuals outside of the 1986 to 1990 window should be compensated. Yet not one cheque has been signed to comply with that motion.

We saw the same thing with another one that I brought forward to the House on the sale of pharmaceuticals to the United States on Internet pharmacies. It was a directive by 288 members to zero in the House. Yet we have seen absolutely nothing from the government to give us any confidence that this will happen.

This happens all the time. This will be the 15th time. We will vote on this, the House will agree with the motion and the government will ignore it. That is contempt of Parliament if I ever saw it, and it has to stop.

Why is it so important for us to deal with the Access to Information Act? I think it has to be examined because there is a question here. How does the government think it is in the interests of Canadians to take their money and put it into foundations, for example, which already have $9 billion in them, setting it aside so it can be hidden from them? Foundations are outside the purview of the Auditor General and outside access to information. It is as if the money the government puts into foundations has nothing to do with public money. It is as if it is Liberal money that the government is just sliding into a separate fund.

In light of the sponsorship scandal and the dollars we see going into foundations, we have to ask this question. What government in its right mind would take that amount of money and put it outside the Access to Information Act and the Auditor General's ability to investigate? I believe the government will have a difficult time answering that question.

I asked the Auditor General that question when she came to the health committee a little over a year ago. I was interested in one of those foundations, Canada Health Infoway Inc., which has $1.2 billion. I asked the Auditor General if she was not concerned about the number of dollars being spent or not being spent in Health Infoway. She said she was concerned and would like to take a look at it, but it was outside her ability to do so. She said she was just as concerned about the other eight foundations that were set up by the government.

Nine billion dollars of taxpayers' money is sitting in these foundations. I am speaking of foundations like Genome Canada, the millennium scholarship fund and many others. Why would a government not set up foundations so the House and Canadian taxpayers can understand what is in them?

Therein lies the reason we sought two changes, one under a minority government, which was the ability for the Auditor General to access a bit of crack in the accountability of these foundations. We were able to get Bill C-43 passed, which provides the Auditor General with the ability to look at foundations. Hopefully she will be able to look at them, although I am not sure that will actually happen. It is supposed to. The other change is the motion before us today. We will see whether the government will actually comply with it. I believe we will win. I believe there will be another motion on the floor. We will see how that vote goes. But I do not think anybody is too convinced that it is actually going to happen.

Why is Canada Health Infoway so important? This is not just about money or accountability. The Health Infoway money is about the loss of lives. The Baker-Norton report estimated that 24,000 deaths occur in Canada's acute care centres because of a lack of information or medical errors. If Health Infoway had medical records following patients, that would go a long way toward saving many lives.

This is not just about a government that is trying to hide money for its own self-interest. This is not just about the foundations that were set up inappropriately and our inability to access information. This is about government accountability.

What do we have to do to fix this? Accountability measures will be brought in by the Conservative Party when we become the government after the next election. We will have to change the rules of the House, unfortunately, because they are not stiff enough. The Liberal government does not understand what it means to be a servant of the public.

The Conservative Party will change those rules so that no corporate money will go to any political organization or political party. We have to limit to $1,000 any money going to a political organization.

We have to make sure there is whistleblower legislation so public civil servants know when they see corruption within government that they will have the opportunity to blow the whistle without losing their jobs or being disciplined.

We have to make sure that the rules regarding lobbyists change. Parliamentarians must not be impacted by those who have become lobbyists for five years after they have worked on the Hill or as senior bureaucrats or as members of Parliament.

We also have to give the Auditor General more power.

All of these measures have to be brought in. Why? Because we have to keep reminding the House, and now forcing the House, to understand that the job of members of Parliament is to represent the people who put them into office, not the people who lobby them or give them funds. That has to change in the House or we will not have democracy in this country. That is why it is so important that we change the act now. That is why we are going into an election: to have Canadians deal with this corrupt government.

[Cross-Border Drug Sales, November 1st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, obviously it is not, although I think it would be a stretch to say that we would have a shortage of some of those pills. A lot of the pharmaceutical corporations do not want to play the game if they are just going to sell into a regulated market and for that to be exploited and sent to another international market. That regulated market is for Canadians, and that is really the issue. Could they make more pills? In time they probably could because they are in the business of selling pills, but that is not the real issue.

The other thing which I think needs to be mentioned is that there is actually a law in the United States banning the importation of Internet pharmaceuticals. There is not a politician with the backbone to enforce that law and say, “Grandma, you have to pay twice as much for your pharmaceuticals in the United States”. That is the reality of the situation. They understand that full well. I talked to a number of them at a conference a couple of weeks ago.

[Cross-Border Drug Sales, November 1st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I would argue the same thing. That is what my argument was with my hon. colleague, that a doctor-patient relationship in the United States is just as valid as a doctor-patient relationship here in Canada.

We need to ensure that there is a doctor-patient relationship in the United States that is valid. We should do that in Canada as well. I would suggest to my hon. colleague that probably does not happen all the time, and perhaps that is the weak link.

This is not about a professional in one country being more professional than another. That is a phony argument and does not carry any weight at all.

The member asked a very good question. How do we fix the problem? Everyone says we need to ban the bulk sales of pharmaceuticals because that is what is really compromising the price and availability of a product for Canadians.

As for me, I will look after my constituents. I will look after Canadians first. They are our number one priority. As long as they are looked after, then we are doing our job in the House on behalf of all Canadians.

[Cross-Border Drug Sales, November 1st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I would like to clear up some of the numbers that the hon. member has been using.

The Canadian International Pharmacy Association, which is the bulk of the Internet pharmacy group, right now are serving 1.8 million individuals. That has actually been decreasing in the last year or year and a half, not increasing.

When the hon. member uses the red flag of Tamiflu, I do not know if he heard me but I mentioned in my dialogue that yesterday the Internet pharmacy completely banned all sales of Tamiflu, recognizing the potential shortage and that Canadians come first. I think that is an appropriate move. I am not saying they had to do it by any means. I am saying they did it voluntarily and hats off to them.

By the way, Roche Pharmaceuticals is the only corporation in the world that actually produces Tamiflu. It is the only brand name pharmaceutical, and I have never seen this before, that has actually stopped selling Tamiflu, so that it has enough for Canadians who may potentially need it for emergency flu symptoms this winter. I see that as a positive thing.

Getting back to my hon. colleague's objection to the Internet pharmacy, let us get serious about what his objection was, which was that a doctor in the United States prescribing to a patient in his office is not as valid and as safe as a doctor in Canada prescribing to his patient. That is really what he is saying by saying that a doctor cannot fill that prescription.

That is an argument which I absolutely believe has no weight. In fact, in some ways I would say that the relationships of physicians in the United States with their patients are just as valid as those of doctors in Canada with their patients.

I know the minister has used that argument. I know my hon. colleague has thrown that argument around. I say it is a phony argument. I say it does not pull any weight.

That would mean that if a doctor saw a patient in British Columbia who wanted a prescription to be filled in Newfoundland or any other place in Canada it would not be valid. Let us say that a patient in Vancouver was seeing a doctor in Vancouver but went up to Prince George to fill the prescription and that is valid, but a patient from Seattle who sees a doctor and goes up to Vancouver, which is just a few miles away, would not be valid. I say that is phony. That is a garbage argument that does not pull any weight as far as I am concerned.

Anyone in the medical profession who does not have an axe to grind and a bent on this one would recognize that.