Mr. Speaker, let us talk about health care. Benchmarks have been established for critical areas already, but a wait time guarantee is a different issue totally. It means, all of a sudden, that the federal government is going to get involved in the delivery of health care which is a provincial jurisdiction.
It means that there is going to be either a massive transfer of additional moneys to the provinces to provide for guarantees, but the methodology of providing a guarantee would also involve transfers outside of a particular hospital to some other hospital in that province, or to another province, or even to the United States.
This is absolutely amazing because if we were to really think this through, we would understand that there are going to be problems no matter how it is done. What happens when a hospital decides to withdraw funding from certain critical areas so that it could top up, knowing that the federal government is just going to step in and pay for a guarantee of a benchmark that the hospital did not try to meet?
A massive change would have to occur and it would have to be in collaboration with the provinces. A decision will have to be taken whether or not this is just throwing money and saying that we have given the guarantee and if it happens, it happens. There must be consequences for not delivering and not meeting health care criteria and targets of best practices.
Maybe the member would like to get away from the rhetoric and the clichés and begin speaking a little bit about the challenges that would take place in terms of even delivering some sort of a guarantee.