I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, I got carried away.
We are going to have a meeting. The researchers at UBC and St. Paul's Hospital have not been able to get a meeting with anyone in the Conservative government, not a B.C. minister and not the Minister of Health. They are desperate. We are meeting with the researchers tomorrow to talk about some of these new treatment modalities that they are going to work on to see if they can assist people with treatment.
This is a sad day. We are dealing here not only with substance abuse, for which the government has no answer other than an ideological position that the Conservatives call a national health strategy, but we are also dealing with aboriginal people who are the most affected by this. The tools which were put together to deal with this problem and to get the kind of preventative measures that are needed for aboriginal peoples were not put into place. In fact, they were cancelled. We hear of small amounts of money being handed out.
When the Liberals were in government, we set up an urban aboriginal strategy that was going to assist urban aboriginal people to deal with health issues, to deal with substance abuse issues. There was a young urban aboriginal strategy as well. These have disappeared. They are gone. The government is obviously not interested in this most vulnerable population. It has obviously moved them somewhere off the path.
This is why I think this debate is important. It is an emergency. The problems have increased since the Conservatives came into power and they do not want to seek the right answers. They have developed an ideological attitude to things.
This debate tonight can shed light on some of the absolutely appalling public policy around these issues. Maybe Canadians will listen and decide that it is time that we stopped talking about aboriginal communities and did something about them. Maybe Canadians will decide that it is time we stopped talking about substance abuse and did something about it. We had started. We know that if we form government, we will continue to build on those very good strategies.