Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the member's comments.
Regardless of where we live in our great country, we are all affected by health care challenges. That is the intent of the bill. Over the last few years Canada is the number one nation in the entire world in terms of SARS preparedness and SARS response. There is an extraordinary monitoring system within Canada. Our experts have travelled to the Far East to help the people there monitor and address their SARS challenges. We know those challenges quite well. We have done a great job in Canada. Our researchers and Public Health Agency experts, as the parliamentary secretary also knows very well, have done an outstanding international job on this. A world meeting was held last year in Montreal so that we could work with other countries to deal with that challenge.
Some of us put together an initiative which deals with type 1 diabetes. We are poised to close an incredible loop in our country, which is very exciting. It started with Banting and Best and the discovery insulin. We are now at the stage in research where we hope in the very near future to complete the genetic mapping for the genetic component of type 1 diabetes but also to identify some of the environmental factors and develop the technology to enable individuals to regenerate the islet cells in the pancreas which produce insulin.
The member and her party refused to participate in a bipartisan initiative to enable researchers to have a $25 million per year investment over five years. That would enable Canada to take the lead and be the first country in the world to ever cure a chronic disease.
There are thousands of people in the member's own province who suffer from type 1 juvenile diabetes. People are diagnosed primarily when they are children. The biggest increasing age group is between five and nine years. Our country has the third highest incidence in the world. How could the member look her constituents in the eye and say that as a member of the Bloc Québécois, she refused to participate in a binational, bipartisan initiative to ensure that our researchers in Canada, in Montreal, were able to have the tools to find a cure for type 1 diabetes? Why did she refuse to participate in this initiative? Why did she block the initiative for members from all political parties to unite in defeating this disease?