Madam Speaker, I could not agree more with the Conservative health critic. I want to add to his comments by suggesting that the Minister of Health has done a great disservice to our ability as a country to go forward in a co-operative, collective, community based approach to solve the problems of our health care system and ensure we can preserve medicare.
I believe that the government, not only the health minister but the finance minister and the Prime Minister stood up in the House and tried to suggest that it was not federal cutbacks at all, that the federal government had played a very significant role in federal funding. By denying the cuts that it had enacted on this country, by pretending that it had suddenly increased tax points and taken up the slack, by diffusing the issue, the government has added to the conflict that exists at the federal-provincial table today and now we are at a very difficult impasse.
There are three steps that have to be taken before we can get beyond this. First of all we have to have a commitment from the federal government to restore the cash that it cut out of the system in 1995 to fully restore the federal cash transfer payments for health care. That is the only way we can stabilize the system and ensure that we have the co-operation of provincial and territorial governments at the federal-provincial table.
Second, the minister has to then pursue the enhancement of medicare, which involves a national home care plan and a national drug plan as promised in the government's 1997 and I believe 1993 election red books. He has to pursue those national projects. They are extremely necessary from the point of view of provincial governments and they ensure we can go forward based on a public model.
If we are truly serious about going forward, the Minister of Health has to take a firm position with Alberta. By showing leadership, firmness and clarity, he will win more support from Ralph Klein and Alberta's minister of health than is the case presently, and will provide the basis upon which to go forward. This vagueness, this hesitation, this lack of willingness to actually be precise but yet to invade our thoughts and our minds with pure rhetoric and generalizations does nothing to take us forward. That was my third point.