Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to participate in this debate and to join with others in the House who have indicated their support for Bill C-227.
I too want to congratulate the member for Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam for bringing this matter before the House.
At the very outset I want to indicate our strong support for this bill. Why do I support the bill? Why do my colleagues in the New Democratic Party support the bill? Why do all members in the opposition parties support the bill? It calls for something that was recommended to the member's government many months ago. It was the logical step required by the government to deal with a very critical situation.
One wonders, if this bill had been votable, where the Liberal members would have stood. Would they support this bill given the past record, the agony, the kind of deliberations and intensive study all of us have been through over the last six months to a year?
This bill calls for a national organ donor registry. It is something that was recommended by many witnesses before the health committee, which went through six months of deliberations. That idea was supported by every opposition party in the House yet it was vetoed, wiped out, stamped out by the Liberal majority on the health committee. The question we all have today is why? Can the member who has brought forward this bill not make a difference in terms of his own caucus and get through to the Minister of Health to put this item on the agenda today? Why do we have to continually wait and debate something on which there is a clear consensus and an absolute need?
Madam Speaker, you will sense the frustration of opposition members around this bill. It is not because we do not support the idea. It is because we know that this idea could have been implemented at least six months ago when the Standing Committee on Health completed its deliberations following six months of studying the matter. We express frustration today because there are models the government could have used to implement such a strategy which are already in the works in the country.
The member referred to the B.C. NDP government's registry. Other governments are looking at this as a model. The Yukon government feels very strongly about adopting something similar. I am sure provincial and territorial governments right across the country would only be too pleased to join in the creation of such a registry, except that we do not have a federal government that is prepared to show some leadership, put some money on the table, show some political will and get this thing moving.
My colleague from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca also deserves some credit for advancing the public and political agenda on this matter. His private member's motion got the ball rolling. It could have been acted on very quickly, but the Liberal government decided it needed to keep the health committee busy reviewing the same studies that have made the same recommendations for the last number of years.
None of us regret the time we spent talking to witnesses and discussing the important issues around organ donation and transplantation. However, we all thought that when that process was over we would at least march forward with a clear plan of action. Fundamental to that plan of action was a national donor registry.
I wanted to mention the work of the Reform Party's health critic in this area. Again I express regrets over the inaction of the federal government on this very important matter.
We have heard the stats over and over again. Canada has one of the lowest donor rates in the western industrial world. Our rate of donation is about 14.5 donors per million.