Madam Chair, I almost cannot believe what I am hearing this evening. It is a total negation of the facts as they have happened.
The hon. member on the one hand said that he is against the bulk shipments, but then he spent the rest of his speech defending the Internet pharmacies as somehow being virtuous in this country. For more than a year the hon. member will know that I was the only member of this House who raised the issue of Internet pharmacies and their threat to the Canadian health care system. I thank the minister who is sitting nearby for his attention to this issue. This has been a very difficult issue for the minister to manage. He has done an absolutely outstanding job thus far and I am sure he will continue to do important work in this area.
The hon. member knows, as I do, that groups representing the disabled across Canada, groups representing the elderly, the Canadian Medical Association, pharmacists in his own province have denounced the Internet pharmacies and the member, in the face of one of his own colleagues who spoke a little earlier, defends that whole industry.
In the case of Tamiflu, it is absolutely unbelievable. Let me share this article with the House:
Online, demand by individuals is skyrocketing. “It's crazy,” says Mark Catroppa, a vice president with CanadaMedicineShop.com in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Guess what they do for a living. The company has about 175,000 U.S. customers. That is 175,000 doses of medicine destined for Canadians going across the border to the United States, a product that we know we will need and do not have enough of. How can the hon. member defend that? How can he say that this is legitimate, that this is right, that this is virtuous somehow, when everything that all of us really know is that it is wrong and it is threatening the future of health care probably more than any other issue in this country?