Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada is committed to protecting the health and well-being of all Canadians, including first nations, Métis and Inuit populations. Reflective of this, our government committed $305 million in budget 2009 over the next two years to strengthen current programs and improve health outcomes.
We have dedicated an additional $135 million that will go toward improving health services, infrastructure in first nations communities, including health clinics and nursing stations.
Budget 2009 provides two-year targeted funding of $165 million for the completion of drinking water and waste water infrastructure projects to address health and safety priorities in 18 first nations communities across the country.
Budget 2009 also provides $400 million over two years to support on-reserve housing, dedicated to new social housing projects, remediation of existing social housing stock, and complementary housing activities.
To combat H1N1 and maintain the level of community health that all Canadians expect and deserve including aboriginal people, we have stockpiled and distributed antiviral medications to the provinces and territories, overseen production and distribution of the H1N1 vaccine, and procured additional emergency supplies to complement provincial-territorial stockpiles. We continue to conduct surveillance and lead the federal-provincial-territorial effort on providing timely public health advice.
Antiviral drugs and a safe and effective pandemic vaccine are key infection prevention and control measures of the Government of Canada's H1N1 response efforts to protect the health and safety of all Canadians against the flu virus.
We have increased antiviral drugs in the national emergency stockpile system in order to provide provinces and territories with surge capacity in the event that their stocks become overwhelmed as they treat Canadians with influenza-like symptoms during this H1N1 flu outbreak.
According to the experts getting immunized with the H1N1 flu vaccine is the best way for Canadians to protect themselves and those around them from getting the H1N1 flu virus.
The Government of Canada continues to work with the vaccine manufacturer to supply provinces and territories with doses of the H1N1 flu vaccine on a weekly basis. As of the end of this week, approximately 24 million doses of the H1N1 flu vaccine have been distributed to provinces and territories. We are on target to immunize all Canadians who need and want the vaccine by the end of December. This of course includes first nations, Métis and Inuit populations. To date, based on numbers of doses of the vaccine we have distributed and the rate at which the provinces and territories have been administering it, at least one-third of Canadians have been immunized.
We have established a national surveillance system for tracking the H1N1 virus and providing detailed analyses of its impact in Canada. This surveillance system is integrated in our longstanding FluWatch system that was established 13 years ago. The lessons learned from these analyses not only inform our response to H1N1, but also help improve our understanding of pandemics in general. This system has been expanded to include aboriginal people in the general population and is complemented by first nations on-reserve specific data collected through Health Canada.
I am able to report that as of late November, our wave two data shows that first nations living on-reserve accounted for 1.3% of hospitalizations and 1.7% of all deaths in Canada. Considering that first nations living on-reserve account for 1.4% of the population, these numbers are within the expected proportion for wave two.
In terms of the off-reserve aboriginal population for the period August 30 to November 28, aboriginal people living off-reserve represented approximately 3.8% of all hospitalized cases, 6.4% of all ICU admissions and 7% of all deaths. While still slightly disproportionate compared to the general population, this is likely due to the fact that a higher percentage of aboriginal people possess the risk factors for increased health impacts due to H1N1. These factors include underlying medical conditions such as diabetes and living in remote and isolated communities.