Mr. Speaker, throughout this Parliament, I have presented petitions on behalf of people suffering from kidney disease, their families and researchers, and practitioners who try to help them.
Tens of thousands of people have exhorted Parliament to improve the situation for those with kidney disease in Canada: the fine work of the Kidney Foundation, the importance of organ transplants, the importance of the bioartificial kidney and the importance of good research in Canada for kidney disease.
In the second petition, the petitioners point out that kidney disease is a huge and growing problem. They know that real progress is being made in various ways of preventing and coping with kidney disease but they call upon Parliament to encourage the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to explicitly include kidney research as one of the institutes in its system to be named the institute of kidney and urinary tract diseases.