Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all the presenters for excellent presentations and for the discussions today.
My colleague was very eloquent when he said it's okay to have a difference of opinion—and we indeed want to hear from you when there are things we can do much better—but no one should invent facts. In an earlier exchange, there was an indication that our carbon tax is weakening and failing, and it's all awful. I will say to you that we continue to be very committed to a price on pollution, which we call the carbon tax.
We were in Manitoba yesterday. I'll tell you that everyone who was there continued to support a carbon tax. It is the best and the cheapest way to tackle climate change, and if oil and gas prices are going up, it's because we have global inflation and there is massive instability from wars that is impacting the price of oil and gas in our country.
With that, I'm going to make a couple of comments and then I'll ask some questions.
Mr. Gallaway, I very much appreciated that my colleague Mr. Blaikie talked about the health care accord we talked about and we promised in 2015. I too agree that we need to bring that back, and I really appreciated your comments around having to make sure that there are far more strings attached. That came out in yesterday's testimony as well. I want to let you know that the increase we provided in our health care funding.... We made a major announcement of $198 billion for health care. The increase we gave the Canada health transfer was based on what the Canadian Medical Association had recommended, which was just under 5%. We did that, and I want to put it on the record.
I appreciate your comments. We're very much listening very closely to them.
I would like to turn my attention to Mr. Schmidt and Ms. Tranberg. Thank you so much for your wonderful testimony. I really appreciated some very specific recommendations that you had for us.
One of the things we've been talking about in the finance committee is interprovincial trade barriers. I wanted to know whether or not you think it is important for us to be tackling that for your industry. The recommendation that's come out from a number of other people who have come to present to us is that we should have a registry to show whether the interprovincial trade barriers are actually stopping trade—and affordable trade—between the different provinces.
I wanted to know whether that's something you would support.