Thank you for the question, Madam Chair.
The cross-border reproductive care conference was discussed at this committee in June when I did table the costs as I was requested to by your colleagues of the Bloc. We hosted this cross-border reproductive care forum because this is a huge and growing issue worldwide. In Europe alone, in 50 centres in a very small study that was just completed, 1,200 people a month went back and forth between various countries to seek care.
As was mentioned earlier, in the research that's been done, one of the reasons for that is that there are some people in Europe or elsewhere who perhaps do not like what is available in their own country. But there are many other reasons for people to go across borders. For example, people from the United Kingdom, which is moving towards a single-embryo transfer, go to Europe where they can get more than one embryo, which is not necessarily the healthiest choice.
We know for a fact that countries will never be able to synchronize their legislation in this area, because legislation in an area like this is so fraught with a whole country's belief and value system and so on that we felt that the ethics of this were too big to take on. So we focused on health and safety, because no matter what country you come from, when a patient leaves your country they eventually come back into your country. So of course you want to make sure they have had the best treatment when they have gone elsewhere, because you have to face the consequences when they come back. If you recall, we had a situation like that in Canada in February.