Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on Bill C-316 today. I sit on the health committee with the hon. member for Calgary Confederation, and if there is one thing I have learned about him, it is that he is dedicated and persistent when he has an issue he wants followed up. He has done a great job on this bill.
It is interesting that two of the last four speakers have said they have children who will need organ transplants. It just reminds me that we are all people, experiencing the same things everybody else in Canada experiences. We all have the same challenges. That is an incredible thing to have to face. I hope it works out well for both those members.
I would bet that if all 338 members could stand up and speak, they would all have stories about organ transplants. I have a story myself, which I will not go into, but it affects us all. It is critical that we do something about this. This is at least one step in the right direction, and I support it a hundred per cent.
It is almost embarrassing to me that Canada is in 18th place in the world in organ donation. It is almost not Canadian to be in 18th place, behind so many other countries. We should be doing much better. It would not take a lot to improve. A lot of it is just communication. A lot of it is focus.
In Spain, where they have twice the organ donation that we have, they have a very organized method. They educate doctors, and they have emergency rooms ready and available. They train people to improve the organ transplant success rate, as well as on the preservation of organs and so on. These are things we could do. They are not hard to do, and we should be doing them.
As one member said a little while ago, eight lives could be affected by one organ donor. Imagine, eight lives could be saved by one organ donor, and 75 lives could be affected one way or another. It is an incredible thing that we are so far behind.
I notice some of the members of the health committee are here today. In our committee, we have studied so many different diseases and health issues that could benefit from improved organ donation. For many of the subjects that we talk about, the only answer is organ donation, and here we are in 18th place in the world. It is hard to believe that we, as Canadians, accept that and continue on in that direction.
There are a lot of things we could do. We could expand the number of potential organ donors. We could change the rules to allow more people to donate organs, and we could educate our doctors in emergency rooms to these changes. That would help. We could have better transfer protocols. We could train doctors to help patients understand organ donation.
We heard at committee, over and over again, that it is difficult for a doctor who has worked so hard to save someone's life to then tell them that it might be a good idea to donate their organs. We heard that from doctors and health care providers. We could help doctors and the medical field in general to prepare patients for organ donation when the time comes.
A national registry is the key. We are not there yet, but hopefully we will get there. New technology could help preserve organs after they are harvested, so they last longer and can get to the people who need them the most. This is technology that we have within our reach. It is within our grasp. We can do it.
All of these things are very doable. They are very simple things to do, and would move us from 18th place closer to first place, which is where Canada should be. Canadians should not accept that we are in 18th place in this comparison. I do not accept it, and the member for Calgary Confederation certainly does not accept it.
I will be supporting Bill C-316, and I look forward to hearing about it at committee, hearing the pros and cons. I am sure there will be far more pros than cons, and perhaps we can find solutions to some of these problems I have listed and that some of the other members have talked about.
It should be easy to register. Just a little while ago, some of us checked our driver's licence to see if we were donors. I am a donor, but it is not on my licence. Maybe if something happened to me, it would not be known that I was a donor. It should be on my driver's licence. That is a simple thing we could do. It is on my health card. It says “donor” right on it, but it is not on my driver's licence. If the wrong card is picked to look at, somebody might lose. The opportunity to help eight people might be lost. I do not want that to happen.
That is really all I wanted to say. I want to say that I support Bill C-316. I congratulate the member. I know how determined and persistent he is on this, and he is right. All of us should accept the challenge to not accept that we are in 18th place in the world in organ donation. I look forward to the bill progressing through the system.