Mr. Speaker, I thought maybe the preamble would let me off answering the question but I will answer it.
I just want to give the member a bit of my background. I sat as a hospital board member for 12 years at the Louise Marshall Hospital in Mount Forest. I was the corporation treasurer for four years for that hospital. I see the exercise that is in front of us right now, that we have to enter into negotiations with the provinces and the territories, as the federal government, on a proactive basis to take health care into the next century, which is where we are at.
I am 54 and a baby boomer. People are turning 50 at the rate of over 52,000 a year. A lot of pressure will be put on the health care system so it has to be up and ready to run.
One of the things that irritated me more than anything else when I was a corporation treasurer is that if the administrator of the hospital and myself found a savings in our budget, for instance, $40,000, we were not allowed to put that money in a capital trust account to take a look at expenditures that the hospital would be faced with, such as needing a new MRI, an x-ray machine or anything else. In fact, it was even worse because the $40,000 that I had found, if I did not spend it at the end of the year, in the next budget year my budget would be reduced by $40,000.
That is something that actually exists within the province of Ontario which encourages wasteful spending. What I am saying is that we as a federal government have to get past the fact that we walk into the room with a blank cheque. We have to be part of the administrative process with health care to take it into the next millennium. That is what I am behind and what I want to see done.