Madam Speaker, I understand your point, but an evening debate like this is a time when members can express themselves quite broadly and eloquently and can be more thoughtful than is often the case in the hurly-burly of normal debate.
I listened with great interest to what my colleague had to say and what her colleague from Regina—Qu'Appelle had to say. It seems to me we live in a confederation. The strength of a confederation is that we have jurisdictions where all sorts of things can be tried. If they are no good, others can learn and do not need to repeat the experiment. If they are good they can be applied by the whole country.
The member for Regina—Qu'Appelle gave the rightly famous example of Saskatchewan developing a health care system which proved to be good for the whole country. Similarly the federal government, in addition to taking ideas from the jurisdictions, can have ideas of its own and hopefully persuade the provinces to go along.
It seems to me the thing works well when it is clearly federal jurisdiction and the federal government has the wherewithal and the jurisdiction to do something. For example, it was this government that put every school, every kindergarten, on the Internet through the SchoolNet program. The provinces essentially were not involved.
In the case of Saskatchewan and health care, the province developed something and the Liberal government of the day saw it was possible. The other provinces realized it was possible and that they could implement it.
I will give some other examples. I think the member would agree that the child tax benefit is a remarkable program of the government and yet it has been clawed back, for example in my own province of Ontario, from the poorest children and families. The federal government appears able to do nothing about it.
The 2000 research chairs is an extraordinary program. No jurisdiction has a fraction of the number of research chairs we have. We discovered that universities sometimes cannot afford the research chairs because they are not getting the funds through the CHST or from the provinces to support them.
The Canada student loan program has been greatly improved. The millennium scholarship program is 95% income related and deals directly with student loans, yet most provinces with the exception of two are raising tuition fees.
Could my colleague comment on that? Where jurisdiction is clearly provincial or federal, things are very simple. In the most common cases jurisdiction is less simple. What are her thoughts with respect to that and health care which is the main topic of her remarks?