Mr. Speaker, here is what is concretely established by every single researcher and health care professional in the country who has studied this issue: seven million Canadians have no pharmaceutical coverage whatsoever today. That means that there is someone waking up in this country right now who needs medicine and cannot get it.
Second, we know from a source as credible as the parliamentary budget officer, who used extremely conservative assumptions, who did not even account for all the cost-saving measures, and who used the Quebec formulary, the broadest formulary in this country, that if we had a national pharmacare system, we would save billions of dollars. That is not surprising. It is consistent with every single peer-reviewed academic study. We know that with universal pharmacare, we could cover every Canadian and save billions of dollars.
I would ask the Minister of Health, as someone charged with the responsibility of making sure that Canadians in this country are healthy, what possible reason there could be to not agree with the NDP motion to at least start a discussion with the provinces in the next year to begin the process of implementing universal pharmacare. Is she opposed to universal pharmacare, or is she simply opposed to action?