Mr. Speaker, ultimately that was the key component of my speech. As I indicated, yes, we do need to keep more money in the pockets of Canadians and keep our taxes low. Implementing a $15-billion pharmacare program is ultimately the antithesis to all of that.
According to The Conference Board of Canada numbers, only 1.8% of Canadians lack or are ineligible for any prescription drug coverage. To make the argument that we are suddenly putting more money back into constituents' pockets simply does not add up if we are going to spend $15 billion of public taxpayer money to do quite frankly the opposite.