Rob Merrifield

[Health, February 24th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the government abstained two years ago on the same sort of vote, which was unacceptable at that time, but the vote last week against human cloning shows an agenda.

The government took a position at the United Nations that was contrary to its own legislation that bans all cloning.

If the government is against human cloning, why did it vote against the ban last week?

[Health, February 24th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, last week a declaration to ban all forms of human cloning was passed at the United Nations. How did Canada vote? It voted against the motion.

Two years ago the former health minister assured the House that Canada would support a comprehensive ban. Even in October the new health minister said, “We are committed to opposing all forms of human cloning”.

Why has the government gone back on its word?

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, it drives home the point that I made in my speech. If I were sitting in the chairs of the individuals from the government side, I would be the first one to be calling for a performance audit on the moneys applied to these foundations and not being used appropriately. I would want another pair of eyes making sure that the money was being used appropriately.

If the individual members from the government side vote no, as the parliamentary secretary did at health committee yesterday, the suspicion falls back on them. Why would they vote no? Why would they not want accountability? Why would they not want the performance measures so that whatever is there can be improved? This is money that would be very well spent on the Auditor General.

A few hours from now when we stand in the House to vote on this motion, I and all Canadians will find it very interesting to see if the government will do the right thing or whether it will hide behind the curtain and not do what needs to be done for transparency, accountability and regaining the trust of the Canadian people.

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I disagree. I would lay it out this way. We have the responsibility and the opportunity to call Canada Health Infoway before the health committee. As vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Health, I know we can do that, and we have done that. We know where the money is. It is not about counting the beans. It is about making sure there is a performance measure in place so that the money applied to this program is actually used where it should be and in a timely way. There was $1.2 billion set aside back in 2001 and absolutely nothing has come out of that.

As an example, Alberta is probably a year and a half or two years ahead, according to most of the experts, as far as medical records following the patient is concerned. Alberta has applied $15 million to that compared to this $1.2 billion to Infoway and it is on track for having all medical records follow patients by the end of this year, linking physician and patient. Alberta, with one-tenth of the population of Canada, can do that with $15 million.

I am not necessarily an accountant, but I can do the math. When I see that $15 million can achieve this for a tenth of the population of Canada, it means that ten times that amount, which is only $150 million, should be able to achieve it for all of Canada. But there is $1.2 billion that has not been applied to where it needs to go and the government is saying it is going to take not 10 years but 20 years. We had Michael Decter in the health committee saying this should happen not in 20 years, by 2020, but by 2010. In five years from now, all medical records should follow patients.

Why is it not being done? We have no performance measure to guide it and no second set of eyes on this money. That is why we absolutely have to do more than just count the dollars. We have to make sure that the dollars are applied where they need to be applied because lives are being lost as a result of our tardiness.

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to the motion before the House today. It is an important motion because it is about accountability, which is something that the government has been lacking in over its tenure for the last decade or so.

This issue is about the fundamental trust relationship between taxpayers, the people who work hard every day to contribute toward building this nation, and those who are entrusted with the responsibility of spending those dollars in an effective and prudent way on their behalf.

We have to look at what happened with respect to the sponsorship scandal, which has been cited by many as one of the worst disasters in Canadian history as far as accountability is concerned. That has yet to be played out. We hope that the government will look under every rock as the Prime Minister has suggested. We hope that he will become agitated with respect to the lack of accountability regarding the sponsorship scandal.

Another example of the lack of accountability by the federal government is the gun registry. The government told Canadians that the gun registry was in their best interests and would only cost $2 million. It would be a self-supporting registry. We found out a few years later that it would cost taxpayers over $1 billion and would never fulfill its obligations.

We have seen a lack of trust develop between elected representatives and Canadians. Cynicism has crept into the electoral system with less than 60% of Canadians voting in a federal election. This is because Canadians feel that we in the House are corrupt. This lack of accountability reflects on all of us. We feel we need to stand up and defend the workings of the government. We must ensure that the government is totally transparent in all its workings if we are truly going to regain that trust.

I would like to pick up on the comments made by the parliamentary secretary about Infoway, which is probably a fine foundation. There may be nothing wrong with the foundations that were set up with $9 billion from the government.

Infoway was started in 2001 with $500 million. In 2003 another $600 million was put into this foundation to allow the medical records of patients to follow them, which is a noble cause. It was given another $100 million in 2004. A total of $1.2 billion was given to Infoway so it could come up with a high tech program allowing medical records of patients to follow them. This could save countless numbers of lives.

It is not that we are worried that the money was spent inappropriately. This foundation earned $50 million just in interest on that money in the last year alone. There is perhaps more money in Infoway today than there was four years ago.

The problem is not whether the money was misused or whether it was transparent. An audit needs to be done to find out whether performance has been received for the dollars that were spent and for the money that was set aside to accomplish a goal for Canadians. This is important with respect to Infoway.

Our health committee knew there were serious problems with adverse drug reactions and with the countless number of deaths in this country because of addictions to prescription medications, the way drugs were prescribed by physicians, and the way pharmaceutical companies promoted their products to physicians. A large number of deaths occurred as a result of that.

The health committee travelled across the country last spring. We laid our report before Parliament in late March or early April indicating that in our estimation there were approximately 30,000 deaths per year as a result of these drug problems. The election came in June, just before the Baker-Norton report was filed.

We had these individuals come forward to the health committee two weeks ago to give us an explanation of what their findings were. They found that we were right and that there were 24,000 deaths in Canada per year from adverse events in our hospitals, our high tech primary care hospitals.

This does not include the number of deaths because of adverse events in our seniors' facilities, where we know that drug consumption is much higher. It does not include those individuals who die because of addiction to prescription medications such as the benzodiazepine line of drugs. In the last six months we have seen the amount of products that we thought were safe in Canada but were pulled from the shelves.

Would Infoway have saved those lives? Infoway certainly could have saved many of those lives. We know that if the medical records follow the patient a much better transparency and accountability will take place. We will link the physician, the pharmacist and the patient together with a computer program that will look at those adverse events.

Last year I brought forward a motion in the House when we realized the numbers were so drastic. The motion passed, thank goodness. My motion was that it be compulsory to report an adverse event when a physician or front line health care worker saw it.

Nothing has happened in that regard to this point. I understand in talking with the Minister of Health that he is concerned and is perhaps going to have a proposal on the table soon. We sure hope so. The motion was passed in this House because only 1% to 10% of the adverse events that are actually taking place are even reported, so we have no tracking measure whatsoever.

The importance of Infoway is not a point of discussion in today's motion. It is a very important program, but we do not know what is going on in Infoway. The reason the Auditor General would like to take a look at it is that we do not have a performance measure or a performance audit to find out if this money is being spent appropriately or why it is not being spent.

I will go into this because the parliamentary secretary talked about it. The parliamentary secretary said that Infoway is joint, between the provinces and territories and the federal government, and this is true. We have the top end bureaucrats, the health minister and the deputy ministers from each of the provinces and the federal government sitting on this Infoway panel. We know that the sponsorship scandal also had top level bureaucrats sitting on it.

What we see with Infoway is that the money has not been applied to what it was intended to be applied to. Why has this happened? Each one of these 24,000 deaths, as reported in June, has a life story. There are parents, children and victims around that death. They are not just numbers. They are not just stats. They are real people. They are real Canadians and they deserve to be protected as much as we possibly can.

The question in this motion is not so much about whether we should be transparent and have the Auditor General take a look at these foundations. That is a given. A few hours from now we will stand in this House and vote on this motion. The question will not be, “Should we support it?” The question will be, “Why should we not support it?”

If I were sitting on the government side and I had applied $1.2 billion of taxpayers' money to a foundation, I would want to know why it is not being used where it was intended to be used. I would want to know that there is some accountability. If this government does not stand and support this motion, then the question has to be asked, why would it not want that accountability for the people it represents? That becomes the question.

This was brought to my attention over a year ago. We have had the Auditor General at the health committee. I posed a question at that time. I asked if she was concerned with Infoway and the $1.2 billion and the lack of what was coming out of it. She said yes, and not only Infoway, but all of the other foundations that are not only outside the purview of the Auditor General to examine but also outside freedom of information or the ability to be able to access the information act. There are no other eyes that we can look at and ask the question, “Is there accountability in these foundations?”

This is a motion that should be supported by every one of the 308 members of this House. I would implore each of them to look very carefully at this motion and in a non-partisan way and transparent way stand and vote for this motion. It is very important for the trust level of Canadians and very important in getting to the bottom of where this money is and how it is being applied for the best interests of Canadians.

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, February 18th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak on this very important piece of legislation, Bill C-39, an agreement worked out between the provinces and the federal government. It is the third accord we have had since 2000. We have had the 2000 and 2003 accords and now this 2004 accord, all giving money back to the provinces, money that was ripped out of the provinces' hands unilaterally by the government. In fact, the Prime Minister of this country is the only individual politician, provincial or federal, who has ever taken money out of health care over the last decade.

It is amazing to see the numbers put before us and to hear the rhetoric that I just heard coming from the government side here a few minutes ago, with the government side talking about this being all about accountability and transparency. I would like to explain why it is about neither of these.

What it is about is an amount of money going back into the health care system, which we agree with. In fact, the numbers that are put forward, the $41 billion put forward in this health accord, are closer to our numbers. They are very much identical to our numbers for the first six years, but are only half of what the Liberals promised in last year's June election. During that election, the Liberals were not being honest with the Canadian public with regard to the number of dollars available for health care, nor were they honest about the number of dollars they were going to give to health care.

As for the numbers that are here, thank goodness they are twice what was promised. These numbers are what the provinces asked for and what we suggested during that election. It is interesting to note that during the election we were criticized because we said that we would have to increase taxes before we could fulfill the promise we made to the Canadian people during that campaign.

All that aside, it is time to put our swords on the table and deal with health care in a non-partisan way, but before we can even get into a debate on health care we have to understand the situation of health care in this country.

This was not a fix for a generation, as was trumpeted by the Prime Minister. He went across the country and said that this is what we had to do, that we needed a fix for a generation to put health care on a sustainable course. Before we can do that, we have to understand that health care cannot be fixed in the next 10 years. The pressure will not even start to hit our system with the intensity that it is going to until we get to 2020, 2030 and up to about 2040, where it will begin to peak.

The pressure will intensify from now until that period of time because of the demographics and the baby boomer population that is going to hit the system. The baby boomers will be consuming large amounts of dollars during that period of time as they become elderly. It does not matter which area we want to look at in our health care system. Whether it is pharmaceuticals, cancer, Alzheimer's or heart disease, we can talk to any of the organizations across this country and they all will tell us that the high costs of these treatments, plus the numbers of patients afflicted with these kinds of diseases, including HIV-AIDS, are going to intensify over the next significantly short period of time and will continue to intensify over the next 40 years.

Therefore, how we sustain our health care system during that 40 year period becomes the true debate. Until we understand what is coming at us, we cannot possibly even start to open up an honest debate on health care.

If we are going to paint the picture honestly, and that is what I think we should do here, it is not only demographics that will inflict a significant blow on and a challenge to our health care system, but it is the obesity situation we have within our country. We have surveys showing us that almost 20% of our students are overweight, almost 8% of them at obesity levels. These individuals will be hitting serious problems, whether it is diabetes or heart and stroke problems, in their thirties, not in their fifties, sixties and seventies. When we couple this with the demographics we are headed into in our health care system, when we understand what is about to hit us, we see very clearly that the challenge will intensify because of more than just an aging population.

There has been talk of a fix for a generation. That is what the member and the Prime Minister have suggested, but we have been given nothing to change the dynamics and the paradigm of health care. We must do this. We must look not just at the health care system, which is crisis management, but upstream much further, and we must start talking about preventative health care.

Back in the early seventies, we had television advertisements stating that a 30 year old Canadian was not as fit as a 70 year old Swede. That is very much the case today. We see an epidemic of obesity in our population, which suggests that we have to do much more than crisis manage our health care if we are to sustain it over the next 40 year period.

We have talked about what is coming. However, what does the health care system look like today? Emergency rooms are absolutely crowded. Patients cannot see doctors or they wait for unbelievable amounts of time to see them. Some of them are reported as having passing away in emergency rooms while waiting for a doctor. A significant number in our population cannot obtain a family practitioner. I think 3.6 million individuals are without a family practitioner at the present time, and 2.4 million of those have given up trying to find a one. We have some very serious problems.

Let us compare Canada to some of the OECD nations, which it is important to do when it comes to diagnostics. Let us talk about MRIs. That seems to be what people like to talk about when discussing diagnostics. We do not rate very well. We rate 13th out of 20 for MRIs and 16th out of 21 for CT scanners. When we look at our health are system, we can see we have a significant problem with trying to access services.

In the papers yesterday and on headline news last night, it was reported that six doctors walked away from their practices in small town Quebec. With the amount of stress on the family practitioners and the nursing population, we can understand full well why we have these kinds of problems. We have a shortage of human resources. People have to understand that our health care system is 75% to 80% human resources.

We are told that 100,000 nurses will be leaving or retiring over the next five year period. There are only a little over 300,000 nurses in Canada today. A third of them are over the age of 50, and the average nurse retires at the age of 55. We have a crisis when it comes to the number of nurses.

To talk about nurses for a second, we have to understand that the most unhealthy workplace in all of Canada is in the hospitals. Nurses are the ones who take the most number of sick days off of any occupation in Canada. That is because of the stress they are placed under by the amount of work we ask them to do.

I was at a meeting last week with the nurses on the Hill. They explained to us that if they were asked to work beyond 55 to 60 or 65, we would have to create an environment for them so they could function well within that job. To do that, we will have to provide some relief and help for them. It is not only about paying them more dollars.

When it comes to doctors, we have a significant problem. A decade ago, when the government took the money out of health care, the ideology was that the doctors drove the costs. Therefore, if we removed the doctors from the system, we would remove the costs. The Canadian Medical Association said at that time that if we did that, in a decade we would run into trouble. We are now a decade from that time and we are in serious trouble with a shortage physicians in the system. That goes back to the kinds of headlines yesterday. More are on their way.

We need 2,500 doctors per year to sustain our physician profession. At the present time, we only educate 2,200 of them per year. We have to understand that the problem is not just educating more of them. They have to stay and work in Canada where they are needed. We have a three-prong problem. When we look at the legislation, do we address any of them? I would like to look at the legislation and ask those questions.

The government has said that it has $5.5 billion to deal with the wait list problem. The money is in a separate trust fund, and over a 10 year period the provinces can draw down on that money whenever they like. It is quite ridiculous when we look at the legislation and see how that is done. Of those dollars, $4.25 billion of those dollars can be pulled down by the provinces immediately. Why set up a separate trust? We might as well just write them a cheque because that is exactly what they will do, draw down that money.

The money is to go into waiting lists. What does that really mean? What criteria is on that money? They are to apply it to wait lists. There are two chronic problems in the health care system, and that is the shortage of human resources, the nurses and doctors, as well as the long wait lists. How do we address it? There are no criteria for how we will address it. It is a provincial jurisdiction, and I think that is appropriate.

One of the good things about the legislation is it would not tie hands, as was tried with some of the other past accords, with regard to some of that money.

However, why not be honest? Why not just be clear to the population of Canada and the health care system. Why does the government not say that it will give the provinces the money and that they should use it where they see fit in order to help the system. However, it should not say that it has a great fix for the wait list problem, which is to put $5.5 billion into a separate trust fund that the provinces can draw down.

If we are going to be transparent, let us be transparent. If we are going to be honest, let us be honest with the numbers. No longer is there any room for playing politics in health care. What I see with this accord is it is not a fix for a generation. It is a way to buy another election. That is really what it will come out to be.

If members will remember, the 2000 accord came in just months before an election. The 2003 accord was an attempt, after the Romanow report, to do something. With regard to this one, the spin is to fix it for a generation. It has nothing to do with fixing a generation, it is to do with buying another election. We are doing it with taxpayer dollars and we are doing it in a very dishonest way.

The dollars need to be there. That is why we support the legislation. However, we have to do it in a way that is clear, honest and is not confrontational.

The other thing that is so dishonest with the legislation is the idea of a catastrophic drug coverage. This was supposed to be done long before now. In fact, with catastrophic drug coverage and home care, in the 2003 accord with the provinces there were performance indicators and a timeline as to when these were supposed to be triggered.

In this legislation, when it comes to catastrophic drug coverage, it is pushes it back, and not to 2006 when the other was supposed to be implemented. The only thing that will come forward In July 2006 is a report suggesting that we might be able to proceed with some sort of a catastrophic drug coverage plan.

When it comes to home care, it is the same thing. It is pushed back again in this accord.

My hon. colleague talked about $500 million to medical equipment. The last time that a fund was set up for medical equipment was in the past two accords. When we traced that money to find out whether it went to medical equipment, we found that much of it went to, what we would say, pretty marginal medical equipment like lawnmowers and ice cube machines. We thought that if it hit the headlines, the government would put in more accountability measures if it were to trigger and target a specific amount of money to go to medical equipment.

However, in the finance committee meeting this last week I challenged the Liberals on this. No further accountability measures have been established. The way the fund is set up in this legislation is exactly the same as the other one. If we do the same thing the same way, we can expect the same kind of results. It is unfortunate that we have to play these kinds of games with health care.

I could go on and on about the significant lack of accountability within the accord. I want to just say that there is some accountability, perhaps, and that will come from the Health Council, which was struck in the 2003 accord. The Health Council of Canada is probably our best hope for full disclosure from the provinces and the federal government, with regard to what happens with taxpayer money. Whether it is provincial money or federal money, it is all taxpayer money.

My suggestion, as we move forward into health care, is to stop this nonsense of playing politics with health care. We could not afford it before and we cannot afford it now. Yet we still see the kind of spins coming from the government side.

If the Liberals are going to be honest, the first thing they should do is stand up and apologize to Canadians for the way they have treated health care over the last decade. They should give that the money back. Then they should consider how they will work together with the provinces in a collaborative way to make it happen. They should look at how we will deal with the next 40 years in health care. They should look beyond the political cycle. Politicians like to work in four year cycles because that gets us elected.

We can no longer do that with health care. We cannot do it provincially nor can we do it federally. We need a paradigm shift. We have to get away from crisis management on health care. We need to start looking at how we deal with the needs of the individual patient ahead of the system.

We think we have a great system in Canada. The World Health Organization suggests that we are 30th in the world. Every time we get into a health care debate, somebody wants to promote an American health care system. Why would we do that? The Americans rate 37th in the world. However, 30 other countries are better than us. Why do we not take some of the examples from those countries and use them pattern a health care system that will be in the best needs of the Canadian population?

We have a good health care system, but we will be unable to sustain it on the course we are on. We have to do more than just come up with one-off accords that do not address accountability or the health of the nation. They deal with crisis management. We agree with the dollars in this accord, and we will support the legislation in that respect. We are frustrated about how we got here and we are frustrated that we have a government that is not more long-sighted than this legislation.

[Auditor General's Report, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, as reported last June, there are 24,000 Canadian deaths in hospitals each year from adverse events. Electronic patient records could prevent many of these deaths.

Canada Health Infoway received $1.2 billion way back in 2001 to fund electronic records for all Canadians. The Auditor General wants to look at the books to see if Canadians are getting value for money.

What is this government hiding? Is she going to get the books?

[Committees of the House, February 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Health.

The committee has considered proposed regulations amending the tobacco reporting regulations and unanimously has recommended that the government enact the proposed regulations as amended.

Pursuant to Standing Order 109 the committee requests that the government table a response to this report.

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, February 10th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I listened to the hon. member's speech. He talked about the $41 billion over the next 10 years that is going from the federal government to the provinces.

Last June we had an election. In that election the Liberals ran on health care as the number one item on their agenda. As an election promise, the number of dollars they said they would put toward health care was only half of what the government came up with in September. Actually, the numbers that came forward in the 10 year health accord were much closer to the numbers the Conservative Party had laid before the people of Canada, in genuine honesty, as far as what we should be doing with regard to health care over the upcoming period of time.

How did the Liberals miss their numbers so badly going into an election? Was it lack of foresight, lack of understanding, or a lack of vision when the government came up with the deal that it struck with the provinces last fall?

[Quarantine Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the people of Yellowhead and as vice-chair of the House of Commons health committee, it is a pleasure for me to speak at report stage of Bill C-12.

Bill C-12 is an important piece of legislation. It deals with individuals who may be carrying a communicable disease, travellers who are arriving by airplane or ship. It also deals with conveyances.

We have not really dealt with the Quarantine Act since 1872. This is the first time we have looked at it since that period of time, which was certainly long before air travel. We can imagine some of the changes that have transpired in our country since that time.

Bill C-12 is very important. The alarms went off with the spread of SARS in our country. When SARS first came into the nation we really did not know what it was. Canada was the nation that actually alerted the world to the threat of SARS. There was no name for it at the time; we really did not know what we were looking at.

It is interesting now when we see what actually transpired. We were very quick to realize that we are only a plane ride away from any communicable disease that perhaps is ravaging the world at any particular time. It is very important that we have a piece of legislation that can protect the nation from an onslaught of this type of disease.

There are other diseases such as the avian flu. We understand it began in poultry. I was at the agriculture committee yesterday. We had a review of the avian flu in birds which devastated the province of British Columbia. The World Health Organization is very concerned about the avian flu. It has now mutated. Dozens of deaths have occurred due to the avian flu in southeast Asia. We understand the potential of a global threat and perhaps a pandemic coming from a mutation of this one disease.

In light of SARS and in light of the advent of the onslaught of this disease around the world, it is very important that we look at this legislation. It was very important back when SARS hit, yet the government tabled the bill shortly before it decided to call an election. It was more important to play politics than it was to protect the nation.

My party believes that the number one thing a government can provide for its citizens is protection. That did not seem to be a priority back then, but it is a priority now. I am pleased that the health committee was able to seriously look at the legislation, review it, update it and offer some necessary changes.

There was good cooperation in the committee. I compliment the parliamentary secretary for his cooperative work on our concerns. The committee was able to achieve many amendments to this piece of legislation prior to report stage. From that aspect I think we are quite pleased with some of the things contained in Bill C-12. I am quite concerned with a couple of amendments that were deemed out of order.

For example, in clause 6 the bill talks about compensation for airports. I believe that after royal assent six airports will have to provide space for use by a quarantine officer. The airports will be obligated to provide not only the space but also all the fixtures to go along with it, such as heating and electricity, free of charge.

It is interesting that the government would put this kind of an onus on the airport authorities across the country. At one time the airports were federally run and controlled but now that is not the case. The airports are controlled by airport authorities. The airport authorities are paying a significant amount of money into the federal coffers. It is actually a tax upon our airport system and there is a real debate in the country as to whether that is fair. It puts our airlines at a considerable disadvantage to other airlines and airports around the world.

I believe that last year alone the airport authorities paid $235 million in rent for those facilities. As part of that rent they are providing services to the Canada Border Services Agency, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Health Canada, Transport Canada, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority and the RCMP. That is part of the arrangement that is included in the package.

Now six airports will be called upon to provide extra space. They will have cough that up without being able to recoup the cost. We all know there is only one way to recoup the cost and that is to raise the price of airline tickets. We are quite concerned about that.

The Quarantine Act is used very seldom, and rightfully so. It should be used very seldom. It removes a tremendous amount of rights and privileges that citizens of this country have. When the act is applied and those rights are removed, they are being removed for a greater good, which is the safety of the nation.

We believe the act should be applied very seldom, but when applied it should be applied very aggressively. The Quarantine Act will only work as long as it is complied with. It is very important that be the way we proceed.

Another amendment we put forward addressed the issue of a hotel being quarantined and everyone setting up shop in it. The hotel owner would not be compensated under this piece of legislation. In fact, the legislation indicates that it may or may not be compensated. It is purely at the discretion of the minister. We think that is a power we could have addressed in the regulations.

We will certainly be looking at the regulations when they come forward. We want to make sure there is as strong an indication as possible that the “may” will be more than just a suggestion and that it will compel the government of the day to be fair with its citizens. We do not believe that any one individual should be on the hook for protecting the nation. When an individual protects the nation, the nation should also protect the individual. That becomes a principle of fairness which we believe the legislation should reflect.

I am quite disappointed that a few minutes ago the Speaker ruled these amendments inadmissible. We were not allowed to present them in committee. We wanted to present them at report stage. We think they are valid and would be accepted by individual members of the House. The parliamentary secretary and I have talked about this and he actually agrees with me.

It was the department that had difficulty with the wording. It did not want its hands to be tied behind a “may”. We felt that the wording should be “shall compensate in accordance with the regulations” and have those details worked out in the regulations. I am quite disappointed, but we will look at the regulations when they come forward.

In conclusion, the security of citizens is paramount. We in the House and the federal government can undertake to look after our citizens and keep them safe. The avian flu and SARS are, and will continue to be, serious threats. Perhaps the largest threat is yet to come. Hopefully we have learned some lessons over the last couple of years as we have dealt with some of the issues that have impacted our country and the world and we will be prepared for what is perhaps coming down the road.

This legislation is very timely. It is very important. We have worked collectively as a committee to provide the best legislation possible for the citizens of Canada. I am a little disappointed that some of the amendments have been deemed out of order, but I support the legislation. We will do everything we can to make sure the regulations are appropriate and in the best interests of the people of Canada.