I really appreciate the time to talk about this issue today. Not many people know what desflurane is, so I totally understand why this circumstance came about, but I look forward to the opportunity of talking a bit about it and why it is the lowest of low-hanging fruit in terms of reducing emissions and saving money for our health care system.

The World Health Organization says that climate change is the biggest health threat facing humanity, and what we’re noticing is that people don’t always understand the impacts of climate change on their day-to-day lives, but we see more and more how it’s affecting our health with increased emergency room visits from slips and falls, extreme heat days, smoke inhalation, increasing rise in asthma and other health consequences.

I’m sad that the member from Cambridge—he’s interested in this topic. There is a glacier called the Doomsday Glacier. It is enormous and it’s sitting on the edge of a bowl, ready to go into that bowl, which will lead to a massive sea level rise across the planet. So I’ll look forward to hearing what he has to say about that.

Desflurane is not commonly known outside of medical circles, but more and more, the health sector has been moving away from this gas. I know the minister was curious what experts had to say, so I am here to share that today.

The Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society recommends not using it. Ontario’s Anesthesiologists also support eliminating des from our hospitals. It’s also being banned in the European Union, Scotland and other jurisdictions around the world. So we know that experts in this field recommend banning des from our operating rooms. Why? Well, it costs more; it costs a lot more. In Health Sciences North, the hospital in Sudbury, they saved $250,000 by banning desflurane. In Mississauga, Trillium Health Partners saved $125,000 by banning it.

Not only is it good financially for hospitals to ban this, but it’s also a good way to reduce emissions. Des makes up about 5% of the carbon emissions of our hospitals, and if hospitals were a country, they would be the fifth-largest emitter worldwide. So that’s a benefit not only financially but also environmentally. So I hope that we can look forward to the government banning this anaesthetic gas.

Environmentally speaking, for example, the carbon emissions saved by Health Sciences North equated to driving to the moon and back four times. This is how much carbon emissions were reduced simply by banning desflurane.

One might ask: Well, why aren’t we banning it already? Good question, because there is an alternative, sevoflurane, which is 26.8 times less carbon emissions, and it’s cheaper. So we already have anaesthesiologists using the alternative. The companies who produce desflurane also produce the sevoflurane. It won’t have a negative impact on our economy. And so it makes a lot of sense. So if we don’t do it based on the reduction in carbon emissions, we should do it just based on the reduction of our budget to hospitals, the savings that they would see.

It’s part of a bigger work, though. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the Ontario Medical Association is looking for changes as part of a bigger work, like creating an office of sustainability. Yes, banning desflurane is a first step in reducing emissions in hospitals and saving money, but the OMA is looking to create a bigger, more holistic approach to reducing waste, reducing emissions in hospitals and saving more money in our hospitals sector.

We’ve seen since COVID the rise of single-use plastics and single-use apparatuses. Some of the stories are quite alarming of just throwing things out. A lot of newcomers who work in our hospitals sector are aghast at the amount of waste that we create, and I think if any of us has spent time in hospitals, we’re alarmed at the amount of garbage that’s going out the backdoor.

To say a few more words about that, at the Trillium health network, for example, using inter-surgical circuits saved $37,000 in one year; bring-your-own reusable bags saved $19,000; using Stryker sustainability services, they reduced their budget by $145,000; using reusable gowns—they don’t have a number, but they saved 15 tonnes of waste; and addressing the HVAC optimization saved $4,400.

I haven’t even mentioned a lot of the other types of waste and CO₂ reductions—