Mr. Speaker, as NDP health critic on April 2, 1994 in third reading debate on the Canada Health Act, I welcomed the move to eliminate extra billing and user fees. But I also asked the Liberal government of the day, which was the first federal government to unilaterally cut back on federal transfers, "to sit down with the provinces and renegotiate that funding relationship so we can have a full-fledged financial partnership with respect to medicare".
The Liberal government's new Canada health and social transfer with its $7 billion cut is just another Liberal unilateral cut and a further erosion of the partnership that was medicare.
Dealing with private clinics is one thing, but it is a form of straining out gnats while swallowing camels if the federal government continues to set up medicare for destruction by starving it to death.
When it comes to medicare the Liberals are into a form of passive euthanasia that plays into the hands of those who would like to actively destroy it by what I would call right wing assisted suicide.