Mr. Chair, I was going to say it is a great treat to have the Minister of Health in the House tonight, and I suppose there are other words I could have used as well to be generous, but to have the parliamentary secretary, my colleague from New Brunswick, and her officials here is even better. I hope I can keep my questions short for the minister so I can get a few of them in. I think this one will start out in sort of a generous tone.
One thing suggested by Romanow was vesting more transparency in the transfer of moneys from the federal government to the province. To be honest, the provinces try to minimize that amount of money, the federal government tries to maximize it and there are all kinds of smoke screens all over the place. One of them is this idea of tax points. I guess in all honesty many of us, health officials included, have a hard time identifying exactly how much money flows to the provinces and when.
As evidence of that, one of the most confusing answers ever given on the floor of the House of Commons was to me by the Prime Minister in question period in February, after the agreement with the provinces, about old money, new money, so on and so forth. I will not quote the Prime Minister because it is quite confusing and I would not want to confuse the Chair.
The fact is we can do a lot to improve that. Does she agree with Romanow? I want to remind the minister that one of the suggestions we had in the last federal campaign was to include that sixth principle of health care. If we are to have another principle of health care, it should be full transparency so we could eliminate those types of petty arguments that really do nothing to help fix the system. Could the minister respond to that?