Mr. Speaker, the NDP launched a national campaign in September of this year. We are now going across the country, consulting and speaking with Canadians in public health forums. We are holding expert stakeholder meetings. We have had an incredible response.
It is really quite ironic. We face a government that has refused to talk to Canadians about health care. It has walked away from the table. The government does not consider health care its responsibility, yet the response that we are getting out in local communities and in the polls from the Canadian Medical Association is that the number one issue for Canadians is for the federal government to take leadership on health care. The government is going in the complete opposite direction from what Canadians want. What we are hearing from Canadians when we go out in our public forums and talk with people is that this issue of drug costs and how high and unaffordable they are for so many people is something that is now very serious.
We even have situations where, for example, a cancer patient in New Brunswick who is paying an average of $60,000 for cancer drugs is being urged to move to British Columbia where those costs would be covered. We can see the inequities across the country. There are provinces that are working very hard, such as Nova Scotia and Manitoba, to deal with this but it is not within the framework of a national collaboration around drug costs.
The member is right when she raises this as a very specific question, because it is one of the key concerns that Canadians have. It is really very bothering to me that there is so much that the federal government could easily do from an economic point of view of saving billions of dollars and also from a social equity point of view in terms of making sure there are not these inequities in our health care system, yet the government has walked away.
The report that we are debating today is an opportunity for us to focus the limelight on these key questions and to make it clear that there is a progressive vision for health care in this country, and it is coming from the NDP.