Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Boissonnault, for coming here today. Good luck with your new appointment with your government. I wish you well on that.
Back in 2013, the Canadian Blood Services received approval from Health Canada to reduce the deferral period for men who have sex with men from indefinite down to five years. Of course, since then we've had an election, and I know through running against my opponent in my riding that the Liberal Party ran on this goal of reducing that five-year ban right down to zero.
In 2016, your government reduced that ban from five years to one year, and I applaud you for that, but you ran on an election platform that you were going to reduce this down to zero. Here we are in 2017, and we are working on this scientific study right now. We've spent $3 million to date on this two-day meeting we had and the research that has been done. You were at the meeting. We wanted to be there to sit through these meetings that we were not as a Conservative caucus invited to. We found this quite insulting, as we had been working on this for quite some time as well.
In light of of your promise of going down to zero, I want to know the time frame. When do you see this happening? This is a decision that you will have to make as a government. Is this something you are now backing off on? Please let us all know. Let Canadians know where you are going with this blood ban. Is it going down to zero?