Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Motion No. 124, put forward by the hon. member for Richmond—Arthabaska. It calls on the government to equip RCMP vehicles with automated external defibrillators, or AEDs. It also calls upon the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security to conduct a study to determine the availability of AEDs in first responders' vehicles across Canada and make recommendations to the House in that regard, while respecting the jurisdiction of other levels of government.
I had the opportunity of being the executive director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation, and I want to share the member's enthusiasm for the use of AEDs in our communities. There is no doubt that these devices save lives. If we were to witness a cardiac event occur right now and did nothing, the chance of that life being saved is about 5%. If CPR is utilized in the first couple of minutes, that chance goes up to about 25%. When an AED is used within the first three minutes, it is north of 75%. These numbers are staggering when we start applying them on a nationwide basis.
Clearly, we need to be doing a much better job. On average, our ambient save rate is only at about 7%. When we look at King County, a jurisdiction in the United States that includes Seattle, it often gets as high as 16%. If we could just replicate that save rate across Canada, it would mean three jumbo jets filled with people not crashing, burning, and dying every single year.
For me, I particularly want to thank the member because this issue hit home personally. My partner's father had a heart attack, where an AED, quick thinking, and CPR played a major role in his survival. Too sadly, we hear of these cases all over the place. Most sadly, we hear it in the case when an AED is not available and, unfortunately, a life is unnecessarily lost.
There is strong and compelling evidence—