Madam Chair, personally I could do very little unless I wanted to give Mr. Keller one of my kidneys. It is not about what I can personally do; it is about what the government can do.
It is one thing to say that the provinces deliver services, but everywhere that deals with organ donation, we have to be able to talk about a national registry. It was the federal government that put together the $35 million over five years to look at pulling together some kind of national infrastructure to do this. It just has not worked because since then all the necessary work has not happened.
We need to talk about how we work with provinces. Obviously the doctors in the provincial systems will actually do the donation, the operation, and get the transplant done, but we need to have a registry so that if a doctor in Ontario knows someone needs a donation of a kidney and knows that Alberta has someone in an ICU who just passed on, we could get that kidney here quickly. This is the kind of thing we need to talk about. We cannot keep looking at small, narrow jurisdictions. This is the kind of thing that lends itself to federal leadership. The federal government cannot walk away from this. It started in 2001 to do something; it is time to move and to put the structures in place.
The CMA has given us great ideas on how to do it. I read them out and I do not want to read them out again, but there has to be an oversight of a third party that is able to do this. There has to be a national registry. There has to be standardization across the country for organ donation. It has to be done in a fair and equitable manner, but we need to know where there is an organ, where there is a donor and where there is a donee. We need to know it immediately. This is something that must happen as soon as an organ is available.