Madam Speaker, I was at the 1983 NDP convention when Tommy Douglas was addressing the crowd, the last speech he gave before he passed away. His whole speech was a cautionary tale. He said that as difficult as it was to win the medicare debate, that it would be even more difficult to hang onto it because there will always be the enemies of medicare who are seeking to tear it down, the privateers who never really liked it to begin with and were always against it and who will do anything to discredit and to destabilize the system by which most people identify themselves as Canadians.
The only part of the hon. member's speech, frankly, that I would like to give any credence to is the point she made about the funding mechanisms. Would she agree that back in the old days of the EPF system, established programs financing, where it was fifty-fifty, that an erosion took place through the cap and then the cap on cap to the CHST to where the federal government is now only at 14% of the total health care cost? Would she not agree that if we went back to a fifty-fifty program financing formula that the province of British Columbia would not have had to raise its PST and we would have an adequately funded system that would not be at risk from the privateers?