Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this motion. When I first looked at it, I was absolutely appalled. It is appalling because it is a motion that is so absolutely partisan. It was introduced on September 26, eight months after the Conservatives formed government. The Liberals are saying that we broke promises on wait times and have not provided the necessary funding or resources. We have not cut any funding or resources. That is exactly what has happened with regard to health care.
We have introduced some wait times initiatives, and I will talk about those in a few minutes. However, the partisanship of this is appalling. If we want to talk about partisanship, I will talk a bit about what the last Liberal government did. I do not want to dwell on the negative, but I have to level the playing field and set the record straight with regard to 13 years of terror in health care, one might say, by a Liberal government. It did nothing but increased wait times to 91% longer in the time it was in office. It pulled $25 billion out of health care in the mid 1990s.
By the year 2000, it decided there should be an accord to do something about health care. There were three accords in fact. There were accords in 2000, 2003 and 2004. What is really interesting is it followed the accords with a bunch of studies. The oldest trick in politics is when one does not want to make a decision, one puts it off to a commission, a committee or a study. That is exactly what happened.
We saw the Mazankowski report on what the provinces were doing. We had the Fyke report, the Clair commission, the Kirby report and the Romanow report. We were reported to death. The problem is not that we have not studied health care.
When we look at what the previous government did, it is absolutely startling. When it is in a situation where it refuses to deal with a problem at hand, it can cost a tremendous amount of money. We saw that in health care. However, it is worse than that. When a government dithers and does not take the initiative to lead--