Mr. Speaker, I think it is safe to say that the discussions on wait time guarantees have been initiated since the election of this government. They are ongoing.
What I can report to this House is that considerable work has been done on benchmarking in the months gone by. I see wait time guarantees as the logical next step. Once a benchmark has been put in place, that is to say, that a certain procedure should take place within a certain period of time, it is the next logical step for governments to guarantee to the people of Canada that they will in fact get that procedure done or that malady looked after by the health system within that acceptable period of time. To me this is a logical next step. It certainly has its promoters within provincial and territorial governments.
As I mentioned in my remarks, the Government of Quebec recently announced its first set of wait time guarantees on hip, knee and cataract replacements. These are the first wait time guarantees in Canada. I expect they will not be the last.