I'm going to make a few comments, and then I will direct a question to Ms. Watson and Ms. Rennie.
I want to start by saying that there are a lot of grandmothers here in the room, and in my five years as a parliamentarian I have not met a more compelling or motivated group of witnesses on any issue.
I can assure you that the first question I had when I saw this piece of legislation come before us and I sat with officials to talk about it was whether there was any way at all to modify this bill to achieve something positive, without the negative unintended consequences we've talked about. As far as addressing this issue, we're on the same page.
Ms. Rennie, in your opening statement you said that we need to do something. I think we can all agree that we need to do something.
There are a few other things you talked about in your opening statement. You said the issue is not about patents or intellectual property; it's about people. Part of the problem in dealing with this bill is that while I agree with you that the issue is about people, the bill is entirely about patents, IP, and food and drug regulations. That's where we're going to see unintended consequences. It's our job as parliamentarians to consider the impacts of the legislation we pass on all sorts of things.
You also talked about the need of the Canadian government to step up. We've heard that from witnesses who have come before the committee in the past week. We heard it today when Ms. MacLean talked about the 5.2 million people who are getting treatment today. I think you said there were 8,000 originally. The numbers we have are 400,000 in 2003, and I believe there was a twelve-fold increase to 2010 to get to 5.2 million. It seems that we're well on our way to the 10 million in total that we need to get to.
I would say that something is working. We know that considerable momentum is occurring. We can see that through the investments we've made in the global fund--$540 million for the next three years--a significant contribution is being made by the Canadian government. Let's face it, that contribution is simply being made by Canadians. We're not spending government money, we're spending taxpayers' money, Canadians' money, and we've increased the amount we're spending. So we're seeing some impact.
I have to be honest with you, Ms. Watson. You made some comments about what's going to happen with this bill. I voted against it in the first place when it was before the House, for what I consider to be good reasons. At this point I haven't heard anything that convinces me to not vote against it the second time. But I want to assure you that moving forward I want to focus my attention on addressing the actual issue: that people in Africa who don't need to be dying are dying for want of very simple solutions. We need to find ways to address that.
As we move forward, if this bill doesn't pass, how can we take the momentum and considerable enthusiasm the grandmothers bring to the table and work together to achieve some real results? What other areas could the grandmothers be working on, or are working on currently?