The hiring credit is $165 million and the proposed increase is $1.2 billion, so I think it's important to put the scale and potential deleterious impact of the increase into perspective.
I have a question for the Canadian Medical Association. We have an aging population in Canada. Health care costs are going to go up. We also have a crime rate that's going down. Yet the government is proposing to move forward with legislation that will dramatically increase spending on prisons and the crime side, at a time, again, when we have an aging population, rising health care costs, and crime going down.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that just some of the government's crime legislation will cost $13 billion. Is there a risk to the Canadian health care system, on the eve of the 2014 deadline negotiations of the next health care accord, of gutting the federal capacity to invest in health care with this level of spending on crime bills?