Mr. Speaker, that is an important question. My colleague is also a physician. She knows that one can look back. It was in the 1950s and 1960s when this occurred. We can ask why, but that is something I cannot answer. I was not around. I was not in government at the time. I was not privy to the discussions around the table.
I know the then minister of health under the Conservative government decided he would not provide compensation. The excuse he gave was that the government would then have to provide compensation for the many people who had been infected by tainted blood.
The issue is not what happened and why, it is where do we go from here. How do we right those wrongs? How do we move forward now? We have to learn from this so it never happens again, so the people who are harmed as a result of decisions made by governments will know that the government will do the right thing and come up solutions.
I cannot account for what happened then, but we need to move on and learn so that in the future this does not recur.