Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This is a clearly discriminatory regulation and it will certainly not withstand a charter challenge. At the same time, no one wants to compromise the supply of organs for donation and cause a scandal such as we had with tainted blood.
I would really have like to have Mr. Germain back at the table so that he could react to Mr. Levy's comments. I would like you to explain how third-generation HIV screening tests would allow us to maintain the safety criteria to which we all subscribe. It is too easy to say, as others, other witnesses have stated before you that it is “the” scientific community, as if it existed with a capital S and C, and everyone had the same opinion.
Between the time when Brian Mulroney's Conservatives tabled their first strategy in the fight against AIDS and the time when minister Pettigrew renewed it, the face of AIDS had changed. The two sets of statistics presented by Ms. Gillham-Eisen and by Mr. Levy are in agreement. People becoming infected in Canada are not, for the most part, men having sex with other men. That has not been the case for at least three years. So the statistics and the data that were presented to us by the witnesses before you cannot be entirely defended.
Tell us how these third-generation tests, particularly the PCR RNA test, would provide us with the quality standards you are upholding, and explain the difference between an organ donation when the person is alive and consents to it and a organ donation when a person is deceased. Explain to us how things would work in those two cases.
Mr. Chair, I would really like to have Mr. Germain's opinion. Can we get him back to the table?