Thanks very much, Chair, and thanks to my colleague.
You know, it's interesting. I had been hopeful after my colleague Mr. Doherty and I started off this round with a couple of short, rational comments for accepting the amendment we had proposed. It was, without much in the way of partisan rhetoric, simply to point out realistically that this bill does not talk about other medications. I guess I should be aghast, but probably not now, that a four-page bill, if you take out the preamble, is what this NDP-Liberal coalition thinks a pharmacare bill should look like after 10 hours of witness testimony.
The other part of that interesting witness testimony was having Dr. Morgan and Dr. Gagnon here. Everybody heard their testimony. As interesting as it may have been, the two of them, thankfully, were not in the same room. One was virtual and one was here, but they were both billed as Canada's leading experts on pharmacare. We know that neither one of them had any input into this bill. They had none. It was zero. These were two Canadian experts on pharmacare, who touted the incredible benefits of pharmacare, of what it could be, and what it should be, etc., and what we hear is that they had zero input.
People around the table may think that's normal, and that this is not how a government works. They wouldn't reach out to Canada's leading experts on pharmacare. No, what would they do? Quite frankly, I have no idea what they did. I would suspect that they dreamt up this pharmacare pamphlet of four pages somehow in-house. Sadly, people are going into pharmacies now and asking for their free medications.
We know that this bill does not exist. We also know that there is no possibility anywhere in the near future of this coming into being, in the sense that there is an incredible bureaucratic framework that now exists to continue the creation of the Canada drug agency and the phase-out of the CADTH and the creation of this heretofore unknown council of experts, or whatever the bureaucratic name is. We don't know where they're coming from or who they are.
Maybe two of Canada's leading experts in pharmacare will be on that council of experts. However, again, that council of experts is not there to make this bill better; it is to actually decide which diabetes and contraceptive medications will be on a formulary. The formulary doesn't exist, even though, as I mentioned previously, two lists came out that say these are the medications that will likely be within the scope of the pharmacare pamphlet. That is not transparency.
Those are not sunny ways. That is not allowing Canadians in any way, shape, or form to begin to have an understanding of Bill C-64.
The government may have aspirational goals, which is fine. Everybody should have goals for themselves that they set and re-evaluate, but to pretend that this is anything but an idea... As one of my colleagues once said, “This is out there telling Canadians you have built a house for them that you're going to give to them for free, when realistically you haven't yet consulted with the architect.” Here it is, “We've built your house, but we really have no plan.”
We're now going to have arguments from the NDP-Liberal coalition, suggesting this is a fully completed house, and this will be a comprehensive plan when it's all done. Sadly, on behalf of Canadians, we would implore the acceptance of the amendment, because we know the truth: There is no transparency here and there are no sunny ways here.
The other difficulty, of course, is our NDP colleague talking about the last 17 years. Well, it's fascinating that the ghost of Stephen Harper lives deep in the heads of the NDP-Liberal coalition, rent-free forever.
I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard them mention Mr. Harper's name. It's in a disparaging way, of course, even though we know the average rents since the Harper government left have doubled and the average mortgage payments have doubled. The inflationary cost of interest rates has literally put Canadians in the poorhouse, if there were such a thing.
It's fascinating to me that the NDP part of the NDP-Liberal costly coalition wants to go on and talk about how difficult things have been for the last 17 years. Canadians know that now, more than ever, there's no chance for the NDP to ever form any government in this country. Sadly, the late Jack Layton probably took them as close to the promised land as they're ever going to get. Certainly with the way things are going, the promises they're making, the difficult coalition and the hole they've dug for themselves, I would suggest they're going to be like Moses: They're going to see the promised land, but they're never, ever going to get there.
When we talk about the cost of things and how difficult it is for Canadians, again, this government really is quite fascinating in the sense that it has this strange idea that after it's created a problem for Canadians, it wants to bill itself as the saviour to come in and free Canadians from the bondage it has created. We know its fiscal irresponsibility is one part of that.
Looking at the government's fiscal irresponsibility, I would challenge Canadians out there today to think about the money it spent on vaccine factories in this country.
First, we had the vaccine partnership with the Mitsubishi Tanabe group, which came here with a plant-based vaccine. Because it was based on the nicotine plant, the World Health Organization said it would be very difficult to use it. Also, because Philip Morris International, a major tobacco player, was involved with the development and ownership of that company, the World Health Organization said that in no way, shape or form could that vaccine potentially be used on the world market. That was because of the association with Philip Morris International.
What happened after that? Well, in this fiscal irresponsibility, as I'm pointing out, Philip Morris got out of the whole Medicago-Mitsubishi Tanabe partnership. The Canadian government continued, while working, strangely enough—and I'll come back to this, because I think it's germane and important—in the face of the national microbiology lab scandal, when two scientists were released from the national microbiology—