Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague has it so wrong when says that we want a private system. Where he comes up with that is amazing to me.
We are saying that the provinces should be allowed to follow their mandate to give alternative delivery options. If the private sector can provide the service as efficiently as and cheaper than the public system, then fair enough. It can be contracted. What we are saying is that all people will need is their health care card to access services in the country.
The Canada Health Act, if we want to talk about it, does not necessarily restrict the ability of private delivery options, but Mr. Romanow has, and the government in this place has certainly been putting the boots to any kind of an attempt to allow any private delivery options, as we have seen over the last decade in the way it has treated the provinces. In fact, it is such an adversarial role that I would say it is almost dysfunctional at this stage.
Let us get it straight about where we stand on private delivery options within a public system. What we are saying is that within a public system we need to have some competition to be able to know that we can deliver the system as affordable as we possibly can. If the private sector can do it, then we should not be so alarmed at that, we should embrace it. However that is not up to us, it is up to the provinces. It is a provincial jurisdiction.
All we are saying is that since the provinces are asking for the opportunity to deliver health care to their patients as efficiently as they possibly can, we should be open to it and encourage them. The government should take its eyes off the system, get over the phobias that I hear and start thinking about the patients and curing the ills of those patients as its number one priority.