Mr. Chair, the member obviously did not listen carefully to what I said at the beginning.
I am not diminishing or dismissing what has happened. I think the history of what went on and the history of the events is very clear to people like me. I was not in this House when the whole issue began to unfold with regard to hepatitis C. I was a practising physician at the time. I had many patients who were ill. We did not know what was wrong with them. We had no name for the illness. We called it, as I said earlier, non-A, non-B hepatitis, because we did not know what was causing it. There was not a precise test to diagnose it.
We knew it was a virus. When we knew there was a virus that was sort of indeterminate, we did not begin to test for that. Everyone has accepted that kind of responsibility. Other countries were testing. We have accepted that the United States was testing in 1986. In many instances the North American continent tends to have an equivalent level of care that we look at together. We did not follow that level of care. As a result of that, the government accepted fault, according to tort law. We discussed fault and because of fault in that window of opportunity, there was compensation given to a group of people who were harmed by that negligence. Therefore, it is not dereliction of duty and it is not running away from facts.
It is very easy to attribute reasons for why people do things when one is not in the head of the person who did it. I think that means that one presumes that group of people are in many ways dismissive and lacking in compassion. I would never be so bold as to presume that of anyone on this side of the House or across it.
Let us stick to the facts. Let us stick to what happened. Let us stick to what we know. I think at the time people felt that they were doing the right thing. They were accepting blame during a period of time when it was felt that there was negligence and there was compassionate access to care for those who did not fall in the window. Now what we are saying is it would seem there is money there. Let us talk about that money, let us take that money, it is in trust, and let us do what we need to do in the process to find out whether we can use that money.