Thank you, Chair.
It's worth noting that Mr. Julian has found the need to interject at every available opportunity and continues to mislead Canadians by saying that it's been three hours, when the reality is this meeting had quite a late start. It's been less than two and a half hours, but that falls into a space of semantics.
I get frustrated when they continually try to say this is a pharmacare bill when the entire guise of this bill is creating or looking at two separate categories of pharmaceuticals. It's been mentioned many times in this meeting that heart pills aren't included. That variety of medication isn't included, so this is not, in fact, pharmacare. Perhaps, at very best—and this is being overly generous—it is a very small step towards pharmacare. The reality is that it's not. It's a pamphlet that agrees to certain categories and to possibly, one day, look into creating something, but it really is just a way for the Liberals to get votes so they can do whatever they want, act like they're in a majority government and have the NDP hold the bag all the way along, tanking both of their polls in the process.
This is something Canadians need to hear very clearly. If they were so proud of this bill and thought it was so wonderful, they would have allowed a bit more time for these kinds of conversations.
The fact is that while we were midway through listening to the witnesses on Friday—and witnesses are where we're in theory supposed to get some of the amendments—the due date was also the due time for having the amendments in, so it was impossible to have amendments in for all the witnesses we heard from, because any witness we heard from after 2 p.m. on Friday.... Our ability to write the amendment, get it to the legislative clerks, get it translated and get it off to the clerk was pushing the bounds of what was possible. If this government really cared about democracy, they would have extended the deadline for amendments until today. Then we could have had the clause-by-clause study tomorrow and been in a much better situation.
We're here because they decided to ram this through, since they've failed to plan to do anything they told Canadians they would do. This is a pattern of behaviour by this NDP-Liberal government. They continually tell Canadians they're going to do something, fail to do it, then blame Canadians.
I'm going to bring up the fact that this is not a pharmacare bill. I will join in some of the conversations of my other colleagues. Rather than continue to belabour the point, I will cede the floor. I hope we can have a swift vote on this and get to the rest of the amendments, because there are some that I think are very important and will make this bill better, even though I don't think this is a very good bill to begin with.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.