Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee.
I'm joined today by Juliette Benoît, a JDRF youth advocate who joins us from L'Assomption, Quebec, and will speak to the lived experience of type 1 diabetes. Just as background, Juliette was one of our two youth co-chairs during our Kids for a Cure this past November and would have met some of you during those sessions.
We're pleased to speak today in support of Bill C-237, the national framework for diabetes act. JDRF is grateful to Ms. Sidhu for her leadership in introducing this bill, as we are to those MPs and other diabetes organizations like Diabetes Canada that worked hard to develop a diabetes strategy for Canada.
Our mission is to accelerate life-changing breakthroughs to cure, prevent and treat type 1 diabetes and its complications. Type 1 diabetes causes the body's immune system to attack and destroy insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, making children and adults dependent on daily injections or infusions of insulin for life. As other have noted, 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the life-changing discovery of insulin, rightly celebrated as Canada's gift to the world. As Banting himself said, “insulin is not a cure”.
The incidence rate for type 1 diabetes is growing at over 5% a year in Canada, which is higher than the global average. The incidence rate for type 2 diabetes is growing even faster, as is the proportion of annual health budgets taken up by diabetes.
Therefore, JDRF would like to encourage passage of this bill. It will be critical that all levels of government work together to make this diabetes strategy impactful by fostering conditions that prevent diabetes and take actions to keep diabetics healthy, such as finding ways to make diabetes technologies more affordable and accessible as their price is out of reach for many working families.
For type 2 diabetes, prevention means lifestyle interventions. For type 1, prevention means investment in new research into the autoimmune response that causes it.
I'd like to take a moment here to acknowledge the JDRF-CIHR partnership to defeat diabetes. It's a remarkable collaboration between JDRF and the Government of Canada, which is up for renewal this year. Launched in 2017 with $15 million of funding through the CIHR and matched with $15 million from JDRF, this partnership is funding critical research to prevent diabetes complications and investigate groundbreaking immune therapies and stem cell-based cures.
It's important, too, that we focus our resources on psychosocial supports, as Kim Hanson just mentioned. Because we can't change what we don't measure, a robust strategy needs to track outcomes for both types of diabetes through a registry, repository or both.
I'd like to turn it over to Juliette to talk about the urgency for a national diabetes strategy.