Mr. Speaker, on Friday last week I asked a question regarding automated external defibrillators, AEDs as they are called. I asked about placing them in RCMP cruisers. I just want to talk for a while about some of the things that are hard to discuss in the 35 seconds allocated for a question in question period, in order to explain some of the benefits that would accrue from RCMP cruisers' having defibrillators.
The RCMP, of course, is the largest police force across Canada. It is the de facto provincial police force in every province except Ontario and Quebec, and even in Ontario and Quebec it has a limited presence, in national parks, the national capital region and so on. RCMP cruisers are not equipped with AEDs. By contrast, the City of Ottawa police, the City of Toronto police and the City of Kingston police, in the local area, have defibrillators.
The City of Ottawa police have had defibrillators for over 20 years. In the case of the Toronto municipal police, the defibrillators were installed when the former minister of national defence was the chief of police in Toronto. I spoke to him once about it. He said that he was very proud of the fact that he got them put in. He said that they have saved a lot of lives. Indeed they have.
I, likewise, am responsible for putting defibrillators in a much smaller police force. The last independent police force in my constituency is in Smiths Falls, and I arranged the fundraising drive that allowed defibrillators to be placed in all its cruisers in 2005. In the cruisers of that small police force, they have been used on a number of occasions and have saved some lives, nowhere near the number of lives saved in Toronto because that has a very large police force.
However, whether it is a small police force or a large one, the cops are frequently first responders. When an emergency call goes out, not just for a crime in progress but also for a health emergency, the paramedics are notified, the fire departments are notified and so are the police, and there is a bit of a lottery. Sometimes the police have the closest vehicle. Sometimes they arrive first.
If I talk to an experienced police officer, they will usually be able to say that they were the first person on site at some kind of cardiac emergency. If they are from the City of Ottawa police, the Toronto police, the Smiths Falls police or literally any of 100 other municipal police forces across Canada, they will be able to say they had an AED at their disposal and were able to attempt to save a life. It does not necessarily mean they saved it, but it might mean they did.
The fact is that a significant number of lives are saved, and based on the save rate for various municipal police forces in Canada, we can take that and multiply it by the number of cruisers the RCMP has. If the RCMP had defibrillators, they would perform, on average, 300 saves every year. The cost to equip every police cruiser in the RCMP would be about $10 million. It would be a one-time cost, although the defibrillators have a finite life of about 10 years, and there is some upkeep, but it is minor.
For $10 million, we could save 300 lives a year. There is literally no other measure I can think of that would save that number of lives for that small an expense. This is a government that is willing to spend many billions on other issues, to create a few jobs, for example. Saving 300 lives for $10 million is a bargain. Why does the government not take action on this?