Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question.
The fact is that tax points were part of the federal-provincial fiscal relationship long before the Mulroney government. It would be quite wrong to suggest that somehow this was a new development, something that developed after the Conservative government in 1984.
If the member wants to go back, maybe he should go back to the first unilateral cutback in federal transfer payments to the provinces which was done by a Liberal government under Allan MacEachen in 1982. That was the beginning of the problem we have now.
In 1977 we had an agreement that set up block funding which was different from the 50:50 arrangement that existed from the time of the creation of medicare. There were people who warned then, notably the NDP, that the creation of this block funding would eventually lead to the erosion of medicare and the erosion of the ability of federal government to maintain and enforce national standards.
The creation of the block funding led to a crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s which led to the Canada Health Act. Tax points are part of the equation. Our position would be that there needs to be a strong and much more significant than we have now cash portion of the federal transfer payment, so much so that it would give the federal government the ability to speak with some moral authority when it came to the maintenance of national standards.
I am sorry but they just do not have it any more. They gave it away as a result of successive cutbacks to the CHST.