Mr. Chairman, that is an excellent question which deals with what we are debating here. No one has yet been able to come up with a decision on where we want to go, how we want to fund and what the sustainability of the funding is. The federal government does not have within its jurisdiction the ability to do this on its own. Where we go and how we fund is something that has to be decided on with the provinces.
People have been knocking the CHST and that block funding. It was based on some fairly sound policy principles that may or may not, at the end of the day, have been proven to work in terms of their implementation. However the concept was that if the health of a person was dependent upon things other than just disease or the lack thereof, and upon issues like poverty, the environment, et cetera, that if we gave funding to a province which had within it social, health and education components, then it allowed the provinces to use this to influence some of the determinants of health and other areas which would have an impact on the health of the individual.
We must ask: Is that a viable thought? Should we go with that or should we fund health care as a simple block piece for health only? If we mean that, are we talking only about medicare or are we talking about prevention and promotion? Are we talking about rehabilitation and palliative services? Are we talking about research and development? Are we talking about infrastructure? What are we talking about?
This is not a simple question. It is a nice and simple statement to make but inherent in that statement are huge and complex issues that we must talk about. That is part of what we are doing here today. I do not think we are here today to come up with definitive answers and I will not stand here and say that I have the answers at all. What we are trying to do is exchange ideas, hopefully in a manner which at the end of the day will benefit Canadians.
There is merit to some of that but it must be examined under a microscope. We must look at what it means. It certainly is not something that the federal government can do on its own.