Madam Speaker, the member for Elmwood—Transcona gave an outstanding speech, and he made several powerful arguments and comments.
The amount of deflecting and excuse-making I have heard from the government side of the House today is almost unprecedented, but I have not heard a single Liberal disagree with the two fundamental realities in Canada right now: millions of Canadians cannot get pharmaceutical coverage, and a universal pharmacare system would save billions of dollars.
My hon. colleague pointed out that in terms of working out the details, of course we would have to sit down with the provinces and work out what kind of formulary we would have and how the costs would be shared. The bottom line is that whoever pays for pharmaceuticals now would still be paying for them after universal pharmacare, but they would be paying at least $4 billion less.
Since I cannot get the Liberals to explain the problem with that, would my hon. colleague explain any public policy arguments he sees against that proposition?