Mr. Speaker, I am the chair of the health committee, so I can probably give the House a bit of the background on how this report came to be and the present status of the issue before the health committee. I am inclined to agree with the member for Kingston and the Islands with respect to the motivation behind bringing this motion before the House for concurrence today. I agree that it is unfortunate and unseemly for an issue as deadly, as personal and as sensitive as breast cancer screening to be used as a tool for delay, as was pointed out by my colleague.
This came before the health committee at the behest of a motion from the member for Fort McMurray—Cold Lake to have the committee engage in hearing from witnesses on the subject of breast cancer screening guidelines. To go a little further back, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care issued breast cancer screening guidelines in 2018. There have been dramatic developments in medicine and science since 2018, and in May 2024, the task force issued draft guidelines, but those draft guidelines maintained the position taken in 2018, recommending against breast cancer screening for those under the age of 50.
By that point in time, many of the provinces had already caught up with the developments in medicine and science, and were routinely screening patients under the age of 50. The committee heard from nine witnesses and received 15 briefs, and before embarking on its study, the motion that is the subject of the debate today was pre-emptively moved, amended and unanimously adopted by the committee.
The work of the committee, throughout the hearings of the witnesses, was non-partisan, was undoubtedly in the best interests of Canadians and showed a positive bias toward evidence, not politics. It was, in my time in the health committee, one of those studies that I would be proud of because of the way parliamentarians worked together, which I think compounds the discomfort that I feel that it is being used in this way.
The briefs have been reviewed, the transcripts of evidence have been reviewed and the committee now has in front of it a detailed draft report, which we are going to be looking at the second version of tomorrow. At some point, that report is going to be adopted by the committee. It will undoubtedly include significant recommendations that will be reported back to the House. I would respectfully suggest that the time to be talking about concurrence in a committee report on breast screening guidelines would be on a report that is significantly more comprehensive than a motion that was pre-emptively moved before the deliberations on the report even began.
More and more women under the age of 50 are being diagnosed with breast cancer. This is what we heard at the committee. The Canadian Cancer Society reports that one in eight Canadian women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime and one in 36 will die from it. Last year, there were 30,500 Canadian women who were diagnosed, and given those statistics, 5,500 of them will die from this disease. This is not something to be politicized. This is something that parliamentarians need to take very seriously.
One of the challenges we have with any health care issue is that the health care system in Canada is partially federally funded and completely provincially administered. However, the federal Minister of Health has indicated that he is in favour of the measures mentioned in the motion. The overwhelming weight of evidence, along with the overwhelming weight of what we hear from patients, experts and physicians, is that the task force on preventive health care, in its draft guidelines, got it wrong.
The direction from the minister, the evidence we heard and the committee is to send the task force back to the drawing board to give some detail to the committee on a robust procedure for determining who gets to sit there, what its mandate is, the depth and breadth of the consultations and the depth and breadth of the things it ought to consider when reviewing and revising these draft guidelines. The task force, as we heard from the member for Peterborough—Kawartha, has been widely criticized, and it is a bit of a head-scratcher how it ended up in the same place, given how science and medicine has developed.
Part and parcel of the evidence we heard before the health committee on the full report was the need for investment in research and the need for public awareness. This is public awareness for both the general populace and physicians. All of these types of issues are those I fully expect will make their way into the report that will eventually be tabled in the House. As I indicated, that would be something that would provide much more substance for a concurrence motion.
I am going to end it there. I thought that colour would be helpful to the House on this debate.
While I am on my feet, I move:
That this question be now put.
