Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleagues here for unfailingly supporting my actions.
First off, I want to say that we are extremely happy with the agreement negotiated after a hard fought battle with the provinces. I will have an opportunity to mention it again, but I want to say to this House that, at a later stage of our work, either in committee or here in committee of the whole, if that is how our work is to be done, I will table two amendments, which I will explain in the course of the debate.
My first amendment concerns the section of the bill dealing with the acquisition of medical equipment for which a trust will be set up with an injection of $1 billion in resources. It was agreed in fairly detailed terms that the use of this amount for the provinces would be broken down. We would like to introduce an amendment that would clarify this even further by setting out in clause 2 how the amounts of money will be distributed.
In the 40 minutes allotted me, I will explain it in greater detail, but we will be introducing an amendment to clause 3 as well, on funding for communications technologies. This refers to the part of the agreement concerning the pooling of data relating to health care, the whole health information network the premiers have agreed to set up.
The Bloc Quebecois finds something particularly revealing in the agreement before us. Members will recall that at the first of the Minister of Finance's budgets containing cuts to the transfer payments the Bloc registered its objection. It warned the government against—one of the means available to the government—making this federalism dysfunctional. Furthermore, as of 1994, we felt the federal government might destabilize the provinces' public funds.
Today, although a draft agreement provides some relief by injecting $23 billion over five years into transfer payments, we cannot forget that between 1994 and the Minister of Finance's latest budget the provinces have been deprived of a total of $42 billion.
On the subject of Canadian federalism, when they say it is a system with two levels of government, that each is supposed to be autonomous, as constitutional law teaches—