Mr. Speaker, I am extremely pleased to be participating in this particular debate. I believe that the government has made significant progress, of course with the support of the NDP, to provide more and more services to Canadians. Things like pharmacare and dental care, which I will speak about in a few moments, are long-overdue programs. In my opinion, they are things that I have always thought we should bring into our country and work on with provinces to develop.
I will start by talking about the recent slogan Conservatives have been using. The recycled slogan they are using is “common-sense Conservatives”; they are saying that the common-sense Conservatives will do this or the common-sense Conservatives will do that. They are clapping now.
I am from Ontario. I remember the common-sense revolution of the 1990s. That was Mike Harris's common-sense revolution, and those were dark days for health care in Ontario. Mike Harris slashed health care funding. Mike Harris closed hospitals in Ontario. Mike Harris tried for several years to close the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston. The community fought for years against Mike Harris to reverse that. We were lucky because, unlike the vast majority of hospitals that he attempted to close, that one we were able to save. The forward-thinking, progressive politicians of the day, one of whom shares the same last name with me, were successful in doing that. However, the reality is that it was not the case throughout the province.
The common-sense revolution was about cuts. It was about neo-liberalism. It was about removing social programs. The minister responsible for what was then called “welfare” actually came up with a welfare diet to tell people what they should eat if they were on welfare, because it is what they would be able to afford with their welfare payments. That is what the common-sense revolution was about, but perhaps the most damning part of Premier Harris's common-sense revolution is what happened in the later days of his premiership. Of course, I am referring to what happened in Walkerton.
Seven people died in Walkerton. As a result, it was widely noted that Mr. Harris's cuts and privatization of water testing, privatization of a lot of the things that rightfully belong within a health ministry and environment ministry that should not be left to the public, led to decreased testing. In Walkerton, Ontario, on one day when there was a very heavy downfall of rain, E. coli ended up in the water supply. That led to the deaths of seven people.
Conservatives applaud me when I say “common-sense Conservatives”, but if people in Ontario were paying attention to politics in the 1990s, they knew what the common-sense revolution of Mike Harris was really all about. It was about removing government from absolutely everything possible and leaning on the private sector to provide the agencies responsible to ensure that we had the right protections. Obviously they failed.
Despite the fact that my Conservative colleagues will clap when I cite their new slogan “common-sense Conservatives”, we in Ontario remember what the common-sense revolution of Conservatives was really all about. It was about cuts, about austerity and about privatization of services that should never have been in the hands of private companies, which led to seven deaths in Walkerton, Ontario.
Therefore I am very concerned when I hear Conservatives go on about common sense, including the has-been doctor who is heckling me at the back of the room over there, including—