Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the question, because I did not have time in my 10 minutes to get into this in some depth. Hopefully I can answer this in such a way that the member will understand and discern the missed opportunity by the government with this allotment of money. Not only did it miss the opportunity in the September 2000 accord when two or three months prior to the election it supposedly threw $23 billion at the health care system, none of that money hit that system until the next April. It was just an illusion, no strings attached, nothing following that money.
Supposedly this accord was to attach some strings from the federal government. Let me tell the member something. It will not work when strings are attached from the top down. What we need to do is demand an explanation from the provinces as to where that money is going to be spent in order to drive sustainability, efficiency and accountability into the system. Then we need to make sure that the provinces put the postmarks in a place where we can record them, so we can find out exactly where they should be and then hold them accountable before the people of Canada. That is from the bottom up, and let me say that it will be very difficult for the provinces to back down on an agreement where they take money and apply it to where they say it should go.
They are in a much better position to be able to place that money than to have the federal government demanding where the money should go when the provinces are quite alienated and cannot apply the dollars where they should go. The government has the right idea but it is going in the wrong direction and it is doomed to failure. Mark my words, two years from now we will be in the same position and health care will not be on the sustainable course that we could have placed it on at this moment, and that is unfortunate.