Mr. Chair, I only have the interests of people with brain injuries in mind.
We can't mislead them either. Even if we set a 12-month deadline today, that wouldn't necessarily guarantee the implementation of a national strategy in 12 months.
I want it to be understood that the real issue is for this bill to receive Royal Assent as soon as possible before an election is called. Right now, the Conservatives are calling for an election every day. If there's another motion of censure and we decide to call an election because the timetable is coming to an end, we'll have to tell these people that there won't be a national strategy after all. That's what it also means. That's the real deadline. It's not just a theoretical deadline.
I have nothing against a theoretical deadline. I can agree to a 12-month deadline. When the time comes, Mr. Ellis may be Minister of Health. Then I can stand up in the House and remind him that the national strategy has not yet been established. But thinking like that doesn't show that you have people's interests at heart. At the Bloc Québécois, we don't play politics that way.
We know very well that co-operation between the federal government and Quebec on health care is problematic on several levels. I don't want to go on too long, but when we toured the province as part of the opioid crisis, we had planned to visit certain facilities. However, the Quebec government, through some deputy minister, decided that we wouldn't be going into such and such a place. You know all about that. That's because the Quebec government didn't want us in its affairs. That's the current state of relations between Quebec and Ottawa, no matter what the Minister of Health says.
The goal here is to have a national strategy in place within 12 months. This implies that we will continue to sit until the end of the current government's mandate. The truth is, if we continue to sit, we could find ourselves in an election overnight. If everyone is in an election, we won't be in the process of ensuring that the strategy is being developed.
Concretely speaking, this is a theoretical discussion we're having here. If it makes people happy, so much the better, but they need to be aware that this is not the real deadline. The real deadline is a possible election call, because if that were the case, the bill would die on the Order Paper. We have to tell people, because a lot of them don't know.
The supply management bill is important to me, personally. The Conservatives have the opportunity to ask 125 questions a week during oral question period in the House. Yet I've never heard them ask a single question in order to pressure the Liberals to speed up the process in the Senate, whereas they did so in the case of Bill C‑234. Will the supply management bill finally make it out of the Senate? I don't know, but it may not before an election is called. If it does, we'll be sacrificing supply management and a lot of farmers who currently need people to back them up and help them psychologically.
That said, I want people to understand very clearly that we're working in their interests. Setting a deadline of 18 months is not a delaying tactic. It's because it would be difficult to get there any faster, in my opinion.
If I were a bit opportunistic and playing petty politics, I'd position myself in favour of a 12-month deadline, then stand up in the House and tell the Conservatives they haven't kept their word. I'd pull out the minutes of our deliberations and ask our Conservative colleagues what they're waiting for to implement the strategy.