Mr. Speaker, contrary to what the member for Charleswood St. James—Assiniboia earlier said in inviting me to change my position on this, I do not know that he has to because I do not know if I oppose his position.
I think this is the ideal type of debate that the House should have. I thank the member for her comments and her speech. I think we can have different opinions or different ways of looking at how we achieve the same thing, have a good debate on it, bring forward different ideas that feed the process, and hopefully come to a good resolution.
Let me ask the member about this. Let us look at the question of the integrated strategy, the $300 million on healthy living and chronic disease prevention, which seem to be the common points that lead to the three specific diseases that the member's motion refers to, those being cancer, cardiopulmonary disease, and mental health, to a different extent. It also touches on a lot of other diseases that we often deal with. Whether it is diabetes or questions of vision, hearing, juvenile diabetes, MS, MD, and many more, they need a lot of research money.
If we have disease specific strategies and we know that we are competing with limited funds, do we risk in certain instances, for example, repetitive work being done in all of these individual strategies rather than being done on a common point? Or do we risk having limited resources available through competitive funding, like the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, for diseases that might not get as much attention in the media or might not get our attention at all, but where we have a possibility of coming to resolutions on some cures or better treatments with proper research funded on a competitive peer-reviewed basis, as is done in CIHR and its institutes? They of course include cancer, cardiac disease and all of those others.
Once again, I thank the member for her points and I ask her those specific questions.