Madam Speaker, I was not sure if I should enter into the debate today but when the NDP spends more time slamming my party than it does anything else I almost have to rise to debate a little.
The member raised quite a few points with which I could easily agree. I personally think that landmines are repugnant, unnecessary and should be banned. I do not think anyone should be involved with them. However with regard to some of the other points she made, I cannot agree with her example of how atrocious it is that private industry would be somehow involved in putting more money into the health care system.
When the NDP was in charge of British Columbia, a good friend of mine spent weeks travelling from Hope, British Columbia to Bellingham on a daily basis for chemotherapy because British Columbia had no facilities to treat his cancer. He was so sick he had to rent a hotel room there because there was nothing close to home.
What did the NDP do? It paid a private health care deliverer in Bellingham for the services that my friend should have had in British Columbia. Frankly, if it had been a private-public partnership that had provided that facility for his treatment, he could have stayed at home and saved all that money. Instead, all that money went not to British Columbia doctors or the health care system, but the NDP gave it to the Americans to provide that service.
While the NDP were in power in British Columbia, heart operations and heart transplants were being performed in Seattle not in British Columbia where we could have had private-public partnerships in order to provide more facilities. It all went south. I think that is what worries people about the motion today.
I tend to support the NDP motion today, in general. It has a good thing that it is trying to do. However the reason there is so much skepticism in other parts of the House is that people are nervous. They know the NDP always means well.
In British Columbia one can still drive by the fast ferries. Fast ferries were going to provide jobs, training and education. There are 450 million hard-earned British Columbian tax dollars tied up at the docks.
The NDP said it would clean up the environment. I think British Columbia is somewhat cleaner because of the NDP, because the mining industry is finished in British Columbia. The environment probably is a little cleaner but there is nothing left of the industry. That is what it did. It says that it will help people receive services but, as we saw during the bingogate scandal, senior members of the NDP were convicted of stealing money from charities that was supposed to go to help poor people.
Although the gist of the motion sounds good, the problem is that in British Columbia we just do not find it credible. When the NDP says that it is here to help, people reach for their wallets, lock their doors and hide their children so that nothing happens to them. Although the gist of the motion sounds good, everybody gets their guard up. Because we have seen it before, we worry when the NDP says that it will do something, which is why we edge into it. We want to support it but the red flags go up as soon as the NDP touch it.