Mr. Speaker, I have to say in all honesty it distresses me somewhat that I feel there is some back sliding here into those spurious arguments that focused on what the Minister of Health and his 154 colleagues who voted against justice last week have done over the last few weeks. This is what has been so lamentable and so tragic.
They have insisted on reducing the matter to issues of legal liability. They have insisted on saying they cannot set precedents. They need an artificial construct or a window, in this case from 1986 to 1990, during which time they can actually say the Government of Canada should have administered a test that was available and did not, and therefore they accept the responsibility and the legal liability and it is just too bad about those other victims who succumbed to hepatitis C before the test began to be administered.
First, it is simply inaccurate to say that 1986 to 1990 is some magic set of dates. The fact of the matter is that there were discussions taking place between the Government of Canada and provincial governments about introducing such a test as early as 1981 and the decision was made not to do it for all the wrong reasons, for financial reasons.
Second, let us recognize that there is a wealth of ethical capital in the country, the same ethical capital that results in Canadians saying it was nobody's fault there was an ice storm but we will compensate; it was nobody's fault that there was a flood but we will compensate.
We are talking about a system failure here and we have a responsibility to compensate people for having been infected by it.