Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Minister. We're pleased to have you here with us today.
A recent report from the Public Health Agency of Canada referred to more than 200,000 Canadians acquiring antibiotic-resistant infections while seeking treatment, and close to 8,000 Canadians die of these infections annually. I have tried to put these things into frame from personal experience. Recently, you may have recalled in the House, I spoke of my wife having surgery. She was scheduled for four days and she wound up with 13 days because she picked up an infection. Fortunately, antibiotics dealt with it.
This brings me to a point I'd like to make. My background is in the labour movement, and a lot of the work I did had to do with hospital unions and their representatives. A lot of Canadian hospitals are unionized, and in that environment they have a health and safety committee. If they're going through their daily work and they find a problem with procedures, they don't have to risk a confrontation with a manager. They can go through their union, which raises it as a health and safety concern. What I'm concerned about today is there are often times that work is contracted out to cleaning services, where you have a $10-an-hour employee, a part-timer, who is reluctant to raise issues because where he's contracted, he's easily disposed of by his manager—not necessarily the hospital. It opens the door to failure within the cleaning system when we're looking at those people who have acquired the resistant pathogens out there.
Canada's chief public health officer believes that 70% of infections could be prevented, and of course where the national role comes in is with a monitoring system of some sort. There have been complaints. I understand that doctors have pointed out that the federal government has offloaded the collection of this data to the provinces. Again, as you can see, that balances off with my earlier comments. How does the government explain that there's a 1,000% increase in these infections in Canada when places like the United Kingdom have cut their infection rate by half, with the leadership of that particular government? Is the minister prepared to address the concerns these doctors have in making sure that up-to-date information is provided to them?