You know, when I expressed those opinions, they weren't so much based on the individual actions of the federal government as much as the mood out there, particularly in Ontario, where people were saying that the federal government needed to take leadership in long-term care.
We've seen the discussions that have been going on about having 10 guaranteed sick days, which is a great idea for provincial workers. Again, there's this momentum that's coming up that says that the federal government should be taking over all of this, and I've got to tell you, as a provincial minister, this isn't so much my being a constitutional purist.
I used to deal with the federal government on post-secondary education initiatives, and I can go on and on at length about them. We had the capacity and the knowledge. We knew exactly how to do it. We knew how to do it in a fair way. We knew the players, yet the federal government would often tell us that they were going to come up with their own federal program, which would duplicate a lot of what we'd done and would be slow and cumbersome.
When I look at some of the things like job training, which is primarily a provincial and territorial matter, I tell the federal government to just work with the provinces and let the provinces and territories take the lead.
I see this momentum that's out there, this political momentum that the federal government should sort of be redrawing society, and I say, “Amen, let's do it, let's have that debate”, but it's important to remember that the provinces and territories are in charge of so much of social policy—education, training and those key areas that are such a hot topic these days.