Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join today's discussion on the opposition motion that has been brought forward by the NDP.
I would like to start by reflecting on the exchange between the member for Barrie—Innisfil and the member for Burnaby South. When the leader of the NDP was replying to the member for Barrie—Innisfil, he made a really good point, that the NDP is the fourth party in terms of seats in this House, but it is still able to do something for Canadians, still able to have an impact in this minority Parliament, and he challenged the member for Barrie—Innisfil by asking what his party has done.
I completely agree with the NDP leader when he did that. NDP members have been effective at seeing some of the policies that are near and dear to the core of their values be brought into legislation and become law, such as dental care. However, as much as I respect and appreciate that, I cannot help but wonder why they would bring forward this motion. They clearly know how they can be effective, but they are completely not being effective with this motion.
They know what they are doing. When we had a majority, we would see this time after time, with the NDP in particular. The Conservatives did not do this quite as much in their motions, as they would just go all out for the throat, but the NDP would do this a lot more often. They would make a motion that is really good in its intentions but then throw one or two poison pills in there, knowing that those one or two poison pills are things that this side cannot support, so that afterwards they can say, “Look, everybody, we brought forward this motion saying we need to protect our universal health care system, and the governing party, the Liberals, would not even vote for it.” They know that is exactly what they do, because they do it every time.
In this case, how did they do it? They did it by inserting two sentences. One says, “the prime minister has now dramatically changed his position and has lauded as 'innovation' Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s proposed expansion of for-profit clinics”. So, if we were to vote in favour of this, we would effectively be saying that we agree that the Prime Minister said that. They know full well he did not, and I will get to that point in a second. The other sentence says that they “express disappointment that the prime minister has promoted Ontario’s for-profit health plans as 'innovation'”. Again, that never happened.
What I found really interesting about the exchange from the member for Burnaby South was that afterwards, in a response to one of my questions, he actually said that the Prime Minister met with Doug Ford but they never even talked about the privatization of health care. Well, go figure. It just goes to show that the only people who made this jump from the word “innovation” and the context in which it was said to “they support privatization of health care” were the NDP members. By his own admission, the member for Burnaby South said that the Premier of Ontario and the Prime Minister never talked about the privatization of health care.
I happen to think that, despite the fact that the Ontario government is flirting with the idea in Ontario, and I know it is doing that, it also knows that the federal government is the party that brought health care in, with all due respect to Tommy Douglas. Kudos to the NDP for not invoking Tommy Douglas's name every four sentences in this debate today—