Mr. Speaker, health is a priority for the vast majority of Canadians. Year after year, survey after survey confirms that Canadians want to preserve their universal public health care system. But there is currently a looming threat to our public health system in the form of the trade agreement Canada is negotiating with the European Union. This ambitious agreement covers services, agriculture, intellectual property and much more. According to Canada's chief negotiator, this is an unprecedented agreement.
To protect our existing and future public health care services, Canada must insert clear reservations excluding these services from the agreement. Yet the government is refusing to tell us whether it will exclude Canada's public health care system. We also have reason to believe that some provinces will not be asking for the exclusions that are critical to preserving our public services. Moreover, the exclusion process requires provinces to add public services they wish to exclude to a negative list. Because each province is doing this on its own, the process is complex and chaotic and will create major differences between them.
On Monday, health experts came here to Ottawa to explain to us what Canada has to do to prevent a potential agreement from eroding our health care system. Michael McBane from the Canadian Health Coalition, Michèle Boisclair from the Association des infirmières du Québec and Marc-André Gagnon, a pharmaceutical researcher from Carleton University, agree that Canada must add reservations in order to exclude health from the agreement.
Those reservations have to clearly define what we mean by public health care services. What is more, according to these experts and a dozen or more other health care stakeholders, Canada and the provinces should make sure that the reservations protect future public health care. For example, if Canada wanted to have a universal drug insurance plan in future, the free trade agreement must not allow insurance companies or the governments we do business with to sue our government.
That is the risk we are facing with the free trade agreement currently being negotiated. According to experts from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the reservations in NAFTA, which was negotiated years earlier, do not protect our future public health care, and the member countries could dispute medical insurance coverage expansion.
We also believe that this agreement must be fully debated by the general public, by all members of Parliament in the House of Commons and in committees. We deplore the lack of transparency and democracy that the Conservative government is imposing in this case in particular, and also in a number of other cases.
What we want are free trade agreements that encourage trade while respecting our public services, which are so important to Canadians. It is possible to encourage economic exchange without bargaining away our common resources, our health care system, the education of young people, and water, to name but a few of these services.
And so, this is what I am asking today: will this government commit to protecting our public health care system by putting it, as well as Canada's future health care services, on the list of exclusions?