Mr. Speaker, that will probably be the only chuckle we will get out of this entire debate because that is not a tenable position.
Effectively we have 20,000 to 40,000 Canadians left outside the compensation package. The government does not know how many there are. In fact, the other day when questioning the Minister of Health he stood and admitted the government does not know how many people have been locked outside the package. It could be 20,000, it could be 40,000, it could be more. But the victims of hepatitis C are innocent victims. No one in their right mind could support that type of position in a country as historically generous as Canada.
We can imagine what will now happen is that the innocent victims will have to go through the courts to get compensation. They will have to go through the legal system to get compensation. That is their only recourse.
Every legal mind in the country and I think every member in the House will know that the government's position is pretty weak on this one. It cannot sustain its position in the courts. It will lose its case in the courts. When that happens the compensation package will be much bigger than what the government imagines.
The government is going to put these people through a protracted court process. At the end of the day some of the victims we are trying to help today will not be here because some of them are very, very sick. That is the sum of what we have been saying in the House.
The minister is in a very tricky situation. In the past in the House I have accused the Minister of Finance of being the real health minister because what is playing out on the Liberal front benches is obviously the jockeying for leadership. I do not think it is any secret that the Prime Minister is not going to be here forever. Of course, it will be his choice when he decides to open it up to a leadership race, but the leadership race, as we all well know, is already unofficially under way.
Now who we have jockeying for position is the health minister and the finance minister, the two we consider to be the front runners as unbiased observers of the Liberal Party.
The minister stands in the House and says “Listen, I went to cabinet, I fought the good fight and it is just unfortunate that I lost that fight in cabinet”. Guess who he lost the fight to? The finance minister is the guy who is calling the shots.
When we point across here and put questions to the health minister we should in fact be talking to the Minister of Finance. He is the guy who is calling the shots. Unfortunately, the health minister is the weak link in the chain and he is taking the brunt of this decision.
When we talk about opening this package up and doing the right thing, the honourable thing, and re-examining this package in the hope that all victims would be compensated—and we want a straight yes or no answer—what does the minister do? He fudges on that answer. He does not say yes and he does not say no. Why? He does not dare. If he says “Yes, we'll open it up”, zing, he is immediately gone. He is no longer in the front row. He is gone. He is history. If he says “No, we're not going to open it up”, he is going to have the wrath of 30 million Canadians on him.
I think politics is being played out in the front benches of the Liberal Party, on the government side of the House. That is unfortunate because who are the victims in all of this? They are the hepatitis C victims who have been left outside the package. That is unfortunate.
Before I finish I want to remind the House and all Canadians that the government found $500 million to bail itself out of a botched helicopter deal. That was just the legal fees. That did not purchase one helicopter. I will remind the people around the country that it was just to buy itself out of a legal problem which it created.
It did not stop there. It did the same thing with Pearson airport. It got into difficulty there and it cost $750 million to bail itself out of that botched deal.
It does not end there. The present Minister of Health was also the guy who brought in the gun registration bill. That cost the Canadian taxpayers another half a billion dollars.
The government is saying that it has a heart and it wants to do the right thing. We have the Prime Minister sitting over there nodding in agreement with the health minister. All the time this is playing out on the floor of the House of Commons, the only man who is smiling is the Minister of Finance. That is unfortunate.
Some of the hepatitis C victims and some of the leadership of the movement were asking me the other day, when the women from Ireland came over to press their case and to show us how it was done, what would have to happen in terms of parliamentary procedure. How would we proceed? What would have to happen?
I said it was very simple. In a parliamentary democracy the Prime Minister, when he enters this House, can rise in his place and say “Listen, we know we made a mistake. The honourable thing is to reopen this package and compensate all victims”. It is as easy as that.
There is one person in this House who can change it. He can change it on a moment's notice. He does not have to put his caucus or even some of the cabinet ministers, who I know have reservations about this deal, through the meat grinder. He does not have to use a big stick to beat them into submission to support his position. All he has to do is do the honourable thing, rise in this House, get up on his hind legs and say “We have made a mistake. We are going to revisit this thing”.
In the eyes of the international world, this is going to be a black eye for Canada. You know the history of this country as well as I do and probably better, Mr. Speaker. We know you are a student of history. This country cannot afford in the international world to make those types of cold, irrational decisions because we have always been a leader in terms of humanitarian aid to the rest of the world. All we are doing is asking that the same rules apply to us right here in Canada. Let us set the example and do it right here in this country.
Mr. Speaker, thank you for your patience. I will entertain questions from other members. Let this debate continue and on Tuesday night when we come into the House for the vote, hopefully the people on the other side of the aisle will do the right thing and support us in support of this motion.