Madam Speaker, last June, I asked the Minister of Natural Resources a question about medical isotopes. I asked her what the government was doing to ensure that Canadians diagnosed with cancer or whose doctors suspect cancer did not have to wait for diagnostic procedures because of a shortage of medical isotopes due to the closure of the Chalk River nuclear facility.
The minister went on about how the government had considered it a very serious issue since November 2007, but the reactor at Chalk River served to produce industrial and medical isotopes which, as I said, are used to diagnose and treat various cancers and heart disease.
There are approximately two million cancer tests using radioactive isotopes that are normally performed in Canada every year. According to the specialists here in Canada, about 80% of these tests will not be able to be performed while the reactor is shut down. That is not me talking. These centres are being forced to import isotopes at a much higher cost to the provinces in order to conduct the tests.
There have been delays. Thousands of cancer patients or Canadians suspected of suffering from cancer have been told that the diagnostic tests will not be performed within the normal delay but will be further delayed. It has led to a worldwide shortage of medical isotopes because Chalk River supplied approximately one-third of the world's supply. The lives of thousands of Canadians and around the world are at risk.
According to AECL, the isotopes supplied by Chalk River on a daily basis in the past were used by 76,000 individuals spanning 80 different countries throughout the world. The first shutdown of Chalk River was clearly a warning call to the government to begin a plan for an alternative source, to secure suppliers for that, and to determine what Canada was going to do on a long-term basis.
The concerns were first raised almost two years ago after the first Chalk River shutdown, but we lost critical time because the government did not come up with a plan the first time that Chalk River was shut down. In fact, it was only this past summer that the Minister of Natural Resources announced an expert panel to assist her in reviewing and assessing proposals submitted by the private and public sectors for alternatives to producing molybdenum-99 and technetium-99m, which are the key medical isotopes that are currently in short supply around the world.
She only launched this expert review panel on June 19, 2009. That in itself is proof that the government did not take the first shutdown of Chalk River in November 2007 seriously or begin to produce an alternative plan should it be required to shut down again. According to the government's own press release, the expert panel will report to the Minister of Natural Resources by November 30, 2009. That is some 10 months after the second shutdown of Chalk River.
As a result of this, we have provinces that are being forced to supply themselves with isotopes from outside of the country at a much greater cost. It is—