Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to join my colleague, the member for Lévis-et-Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, in thanking our colleague from Drummond for all the information and support she has been providing the Bloc Quebecois. She has helped us improve every piece of legislation dealing with health care we have debated in this House over the years.
If we had not had people like the Bloc Quebecois members here in the House of Commons, Quebec would have been penalized ten times more. We are dealing with people who do not consult, take money that does not belong to them out of people's pocket, and use it to reduce their deficit and drive us further into poverty.
Our colleague from Chicoutimi keeps on saying “With this deal it has just signed, I am not sure the Quebec government is going to reinvest this money in health care and redistribute it among the regions”. The cuts the federal government made to health care transfer payments to the provinces created a $38 million shortfall in the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean area. This is a lot of money, $38 million, this is not peanuts. This is money it took out of our own pockets.
It said “We do not want to know, you deal with it”. We in Quebec had made the move toward ambulatory care. We were going to get health care under control.
But the federal government would not let Quebec do its own thing. It said “Let us play a dirty trick on them and cut $38 million”, which is what it did in my area alone. This was a contemptible move on the part of the federal government.
This was not a gift from the Government of Canada to the Government of Quebec. It represented only a third of what they owed it. I think they should give us back the two thirds they still owe. Since 1993, the federal government has cut provincial transfer payments by $6.3 billion. This affects the Government of Quebec. The battle is not over. Quebeckers are proud. We listen to our people. We are attuned to what every member of Quebec society thinks. We are proud of what we are and we are proud of our desire to become a sovereign nation.
I would like to ask my colleague, the member for Lévis-et-Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, if he too, in his region, has heard equally contemptible examples of what the federal government has done to the Government of Quebec.