Mr. Speaker, I regret that we do not have unanimous consent to have a full debate to 5.30 p.m. on this very serious issue. I will speak very briefly and will still share my time with the member for Churchill River.
We appreciate the timeliness of this debate. I thank members of the Bloc for bringing this motion before us today. As they will know from our previous speaker, we have serious concerns with the precise wording of this motion and with the spirit of the resolution.
I appreciate the timeliness of this debate given that we are debating this on the day that news of a potential agreement between the federal government and the provinces has been achieved and where there is some agreement around a supposed social union contract. It certainly gives us some encouragement to hear that there is a move afoot that takes us beyond jurisdictional wrangling and into the serious matter of how we together as Canadians can salvage our health care system and find a way we can build in the future a universally accessible, publicly administered health care system.