Mr. Speaker, it is my first opportunity to speak today on Bill C-31, so I want to put on the record that I support it and wish it would go further.
I want to ask my hon. colleague from Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes this. He made the claim that health care is provincial. I wonder if he is familiar with the 1982 case, Schneider v. The Queen, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that our Constitution does not say that health care is provincial. It does not speak to health care and it is one of those areas of mixed jurisdiction, federal and provincial. The criminal law power, which is federal, is the source and the derivation of many federal law and federal government decisions to protect our health.
Lastly, the Canada Health Act is the federal statute that governs our universal single-payer health care system, which we must fight to the death to protect, because without it a lot of people will die.