Thank you, Mr. Chair.
What I was talking about before we broke for question period was what I consider to be an irresponsible waste of this committee's time by the Conservatives, who are filibustering and delaying us from getting to the budget. In my view, the reasons are not justifiable. Again, there are two reasons. First, they would not let the budget proceed in the House until this committee called Mark Carney as a witness. However, today, they've shifted from that, saying that the real issue for them is when the clause-by-clause study of this bill starts. They are not staying consistent with their putative reasons for why they're holding up the budget.
I want to finish my point on diabetes. I don't think I expressed it as certainly as it should have been. This budget contains monies that will provide the federal government with the ability to sit down with provincial governments and negotiate a transfer from the federal government to the provincial governments. That would result in every person with type 1 or type 2 diabetes, in any province or territory, receiving the medications and devices they need for free.
The result of the Conservatives' action is that it will compel people with diabetes to either not get the medication they need or pay out-of-pocket for these expenses. I want to be really clear that it's rare that a budget has such direct health impacts on people, but that's a direct health impact. By the way, it will also prevent Canadians in need of contraceptive products from getting those contraception devices and medications for free. There's a real cost there, because lack of access to contraception means unwanted and unplanned pregnancies. Unplanned pregnancies lead to all sorts of family implications—social, psychological, physical, medical and economic. Every day the Conservatives delay this bill, that's what will happen.
I've done some research, and to anybody who might think that the Conservatives' reasons for delaying the budget are restricted to the finance committee, I found out that that's not the case. They're delaying the business of Parliament at multiple committees—for example, at industry. What that tells me is that this is part of a strategy—