Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague the member for Qu'Appelle for his very important comments on this issue.
In particular he clarified our position in light of the comments by the previous Liberal speaker, the member for Wentworth—Burlington, who has tried to blur the lines on this issue and to engage in false debate.
I am pleased the member for Qu'Appelle was clear about the fact that we are talking about federal regulatory failure for which this government has absolute responsibility, and medical mishap for which we have other processes in place to respond. I appreciate the fact that he clarified that in our estimation blood injury as we are dealing with now is an injury arising from dereliction of duty of a very specific and unique nature pertaining very much to the federal government's role as regulator.
I want to ask the member if it is not the case that the Food and Drugs Act was set up to provide minute to minute control of emergency health hazards. Is it not the case that the federal government as regulator was and is the only body, the only organization in the blood system that could single-handedly cause a safety feature like the hepatitis C testing to be implemented in response to the very serious issues we are dealing with?