My first comment would be that about two million Canadians are inadequately or not insured. A good portion of those Canadians are the growing number of Canadians who are precariously employed. They might be self-employed in a small enterprise or they might be employed in a low-wage job where there are no benefits that accompany their work, split shifts, those kinds of environments. Even young people might need to have a recourse to medication. Because they're not insured and they're a low-wage earner, they might forgo a prescription and the common cold becomes pneumonia.
There you have the link, I would say, between health and productivity. We need a healthy workforce to have a productive economy. We can't afford to have two million Canadians who are inadequately insured or not insured at all.
The point here is not to eliminate private insurers, but to make sure that the government palliates this gap with two million uninsured and that the floor, the level of public insurance, is raised up. Of the 200 public insurance schemes for medication in Canada—there are 200 of them—the ones that provide the less coverage cover only 1,200 drugs, while the best schemes for people who have good jobs provide coverage for up to 5,000 drugs. The reality is closing those gaps especially for people who are precariously employed and for people who are self-employed in small firms. The incubators, the innovators, the people who are setting up enterprises in their garages, they're the people we can't allow to forgo medication.