Mr. Speaker, I want to thank all parties and members on this side of the House who support my motion. It is encouraging when the Bloc, Reform, NDP and Conservatives agree. I hope Canadians have noticed that.
We can always tell when the government is nervous in this place. Its members yak continually and try to throw off the speakers when discussing a topic the government is not comfortable with. We started off this debate by reminding the Canadian people that exactly a year ago every one of those Liberal members, including the ones that are presently in the House, stood on their feet and denied compensation to innocent victims of hepatitis C. If I were on that side and did the same thing, I would be extremely nervous. In fact, most of us would be hiding under our desks after having done that.
The Liberal Party is the only party that can swallow itself whole on an issue like this and then come back into the House and defend it. No other party can do that. That is exactly what the Liberals are doing. They have swallowed themselves whole. They always pretend to be the defenders of the underdog, the underprivileged, the poor and the sick, except when it comes to doing something. In this case, they did nothing for a group of innocent victims.
I will not deny that the parliamentary secretary is a pretty good person outside of this House and she probably is a compassionate person, but that speech of hers sounded like it came from an accountant. Why? Because it was drafted by her lawyer. Who is her lawyer? Allan Rock. Who is Allan Rock? The Minister of Health. That is bureaucratic gobbledegook. Is gobbledegook a parliamentary word? I guess in this case it would be because that is all it is.
We can tell by their expressions that the Liberals are not very happy with our having resurrected this ugly issue, because they look bad on it. They still look bad on it and it is not going to go away easily. It is not going to die a natural death. Why? Because on this side of the House we are not going to let it die. We are not going to let the issue slowly fade away. It is an important issue. It is an issue that Canadians want addressed. The victims want redress.
I am going to step through some facts.
It is a fact that the federal government did not properly fulfil its duties as a blood system regulator. This means that it did not keep a close eye on the activities of the Red Cross.
It is a fact that the federal government reacted too slowly to the threat of blood borne AIDS and mistakenly played down to Canadians the risk of the virus contaminating the blood supply.
It is a fact that the provinces which funded the Red Cross blood program did not provide timely and sufficient funds for scientific tests that would have screened out blood contaminated with the AIDS virus and hepatitis C.
It is a fact that the provinces did not do enough to track down infected blood recipients, some of whom were unaware that they had AIDS and unknowingly passed it on to their sexual partners. The same applies to hepatitis C.
It is a fact that the Red Cross took inadequate steps to implement a screening program that would have prevented high risk donors such as sexually active gay men from donating their blood. It does not end there. It allowed contaminated blood from the American prison system to come into the country.
It is a fact that the Red Cross did not move quickly enough to replace its inventory of contaminated blood products used by hemophiliacs with newer heat treated products that were safe. It has nothing to be proud of in what it did for those victims.
Until all of those victims are compensated we on this side of the House will continually fight for them. At some point the government will have to atone for its sins.