Mr. Speaker, I am extremely surprised to hear the member for Chicoutimi make such a charge against the Government of Quebec when he himself had an opportunity to make his views known during the Quebec election campaign a few months back.
Everyone knows he was asked to run. If the Parti Quebecois is as bad as all that in his region, he had a chance to run for the provincial Liberal Party and to participate in this debate. I assume that he did not do so because he thought he had a better chance of hanging on here than running as a Liberal MLA in Chicoutimi. I will leave him to ponder that.
The shift toward ambulatory care has been mentioned because it is a very important reform. I do not want to go into this in any great detail because this is not the appropriate place for such a debate. Carrying out a large-scale and important reform in the midst of cutbacks is a very difficult thing to do and it is true that many regions of Quebec are suffering, his and mine both.
But I would remind him that the impact, in my region alone, of the federal government's health cuts amounts to $20 million annually. For us, an additional $20 million for health care would mean a stronger health care system and more services.
However much we want reforms, if one of our sources of revenue dries up, if it all but disappears, it is difficult to be completely successful.
They did the best they could with the resources they had at the time, but improvements have to be made. One of the ways to improve the situation would be for the federal government to correct the mistake it made by reducing health care funding. Do I think health services are managed perfectly in Quebec? No, there will never be a perfect system. However, I do believe that people are acting in good faith and we are headed in the right direction. Our first need is additional financial resources.
To conclude on the issue of the ice storm and federal visibility, I have no problem saying that the federal government paid 90 per cent of the bills. Nor do I have any problem saying that Quebeckers send more than $30 billion in taxes to Ottawa every year.