Mr. Speaker, what I just heard strikes me as a bit simplistic, both what the parliamentary secretary had to say as well as the hon. member who just spoke.
I will just give the example of the World Health Organization. It does not give orders to anyone, not to any country in the world. Does it give orders to the United States or to the Canadian or Quebec health agencies? No, it does not give any orders.
They say they want to establish a Canadian health agency because the provinces are incapable of getting along or incapable of doing their job or because sicknesses know no boundaries. It is very simplistic to say these kinds of things.
We should also not forget that the health agency will have a $665-million budget. Of this amount, about $165 million will be spent over two years on other federal public health initiatives. What are these other initiatives? Will these initiatives not just duplicate services that are already provided in other provinces?
Quebec has a fine health care system. The problem it has, as in the other provinces, is the chronic under-funding from which it has suffered since 1993, the reduction in federal funding, which fell from 50¢ to 14¢ on the dollar. This is what we need to realize.
The provincial health care systems, including the one in Quebec, are very effective now and have developed over the years. However, they have been under-funded, probably on purpose by the previous government. It did this so that some day, since the provinces and health systems were starved out, it could barge in claiming that the systems were not very effective. It is obviously impossible to be effective when there is no money.
I would like the hon. member to reply to these questions.