Madam Speaker, it has been an interesting day today. We started the day off talking about health care and just how important it was. Now we are in private members' hour. The member for Calgary Confederation has brought forward a bill that has fairly good support from all sides of the House. I anticipate a willingness to see the bill go to committee at which point in time I am sure there will be a lot of interesting discussions and possibly a number of presentations. We will leave it up to the standing committee to establish that.
I want to recognize the member for Calgary Confederation and other members. For example, the member for Oakville North—Burlington has been a very strong advocate in our caucus, ensuring, as much as possible, that we move the bill forward. I believe that after today, the opportunity for it to go to committee will be there. Knowing the efforts of some of the members who have been lobbying for the bill, I suspect the committee will be dealing with it in a relatively quick fashion. I wish them well in getting it processed.
I would like to share some comments on this with the House. When we talk about issues, such as organ transplants, and look at what the legislation attempts to do, it is really about the CRA, the Canada Revenue Agency, working with different provincial and territorial governments to see how we can establish and maintain an organ and tissue registry. This is worth pushing forward.
A name that comes to my mind is Hank Horner, who has since passed. For the longest time, Hank was waiting to get a transplant. It is hard to really appreciate it, but these organ recipients often have amazing attitudes. As opposed to being angry, the exchanges I have had with people who are on a waiting list are quite touching. People want to go that extra mile. We often wonder why a higher percentage of people are not registering as organ donors.
In Hank's case, he use to lobby me, saying that we should have MPI, Manitoba Public Insurance, work with the provincial government to get a registry established through drivers' licences. For good reason, it made a lot of sense. Some people might say that we should put stickers on the licence plates of registered donors. There is obviously a great deal of passion in regard to this issue. We have heard that in a number of the speeches. This is not the first time we have debated this legislation.
I applaud the member for Oakville North—Burlington and the member for Calgary Confederation on their efforts to bring this legislation to the point where it is today. In particular, the member for Calgary Confederation used his priority in bill placement and was also able to get additional support to get the legislation bumped up to have that second hour of debate today.
I thought I would share some interesting statistics from the Internet. They come from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. It is somewhat pertinent to what we are talking about. It puts into perspective some actual numbers. In 2018, a total of 2,782 transplant procedures of all organs were performed in Canada. That was an increase of 33% since 2009.
The next thing I will go over will clearly demonstrate why it is so important that we continue to take the necessary actions to support people to register to donate organs. I have a table I would like to reference, and I will speak specifically of organs.
The top organs used in transplants are kidneys, liver, heart, lung and pancreas. Kidneys are the highest number for organ transplants, at 1,706. The number of patients on a waiting list are 3,150. There is some qualification to that because not all provinces could provide the hard numbers, but that is roughly the number of people on a waiting list. An active amount in 2018 is 2,045. The last column really wakes us up to the importance of it. The number of patients who were on the waiting list and died was 95. That speaks volume. We have to wonder what would have happened for those 95 individuals. What kind of future would they have had if they had received that important transplant.
A high number of people who were on waiting lists for a liver transplant died. The total number of organ transplants was 533. The number of patients on a wait list was 527 and 377 were active. The number of patients who died while waiting for a transplant was 82. We can get that sense of just how important this is.
Very quickly, the number of heart transplants is 189, lung is 361 and the pancreas is 57. Obviously, there are tissues and so forth.
The point is there are things the government can do. We have to be cognizant of jurisdictional responsibility. Ottawa can play a role. Hopefully we will get a better understanding when it goes to the standing committee about the CRA working with the provinces and territories.