Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured to be the chair of the Standing Committee on Health, and the member for Vancouver Kingsway is one of the more active members. He has done a lot of work on the committee and made a great contribution to it. However, I honestly feel, and I am sure he knows, that we are not at the stage where we can say we can start a national pharmacare program.
He said that the PBO brought the study forth. It is an excellent study. We asked for that study, and were very grateful for having the study. However, there are so many questions left unanswered. I wrote down what the member said, and he said that Canada would spend $20 billion on pharmacare if we had a national pharmacare program. We do not know whether that $20 billion would come from the federal government, the provinces, or who. There are just so many questions.
We have a meeting scheduled on October 17 to bring the parliamentary budget officer in, and I am sure the member for Vancouver Kingsway will have lots of questions for him. After he asks those questions and we have the answers from the parliamentary budget officer, then we can maybe consider a model for the plan.
Of the $20 billion that Canada would spend, as the member just said, how much would come from the federal government?