Mr. Speaker, provinces had been asking us for a very long time to remove certain conditions which applied to the administration of social assistance programs, and that is what we are now proposing.
As for health care services and the five conditions set in the federal Health Act, everybody in Canada agrees that they should be maintained because they are the very essence of our society and they give people access to the same health care system, regardless of one's financial circumstances.
In any case, we had to be fair in our budget. We could not cut federal government's operating expenditures systematically and not cut transfer payments to provinces. It is only a matter of treating all government programs fairly.