Mr. Speaker, I will only take a minute to respond.
I would urge the member to get a copy of the Canada Health Act. There is nothing in the Canada Health Act that prevents local involvement, local control. We have medical regions in my province. The hospitals have boards. There are some restrictions. The Canada Health Act states that the provinces will pay for any service that is medically necessary. We cannot decide in a local region to de-insure somebody for a medically necessary service. We cannot make that decision because we as Canadians made a decision that everybody in all parts of the country would have access to medically necessary services.
The member raises the spectre of a huge bureaucracy centralized in Ottawa that makes all these decisions. Does the member know how many people it takes to administer the Canada Health Act? Has the member ever bothered to check the size of this huge bureaucracy? There are 25 people who make the decisions about the Canada Health Act.
I have nothing against local control and local involvement. That is something we promote. We went around designing a series of health regions with elected boards and everything else. It was done in British Columbia and Manitoba. However, that is very different from saying that we will have a two-tier system where the rich get one kind of help and others do not, or that rich provinces will have a particular kind of health care system and poor provinces will not. We are all Canadians who want to see a country that includes and brings everybody into the Canadian family, not one that kicks a few out.