MONTREAL -- A Liberal MNA has a plan to make it easier for the around 800 Quebecers waiting for an organ transplant, but, so far, the CAQ government has yet to even study a proposed bill.

In 2018, there were 805 people in the province waiting to receive an organ.

Only about 25 to 40 per cent of Quebecers register to be a donor, and Liberal health critic Andre Fortin came up with a plan to change he numbers by including an opt-out model for organ donors.

"What a lot of people do is they open the envelope, take the card, and throw away the rest before even realizing they need to sign to be an organ donor," said Fortin.

Fortin's plan would mean everyone in the province is on the list unless they specifically request not to be.

For Isabelle Shaemlian, the change would have helped when she suffered from Liver Cirrhosis. She's on medication that can make her hands shake, but it's essential for her to live. She was listed for a transplant in Dec. 2016 and spent two years waiting.

"Every single day, you're looking at your phone going, 'Please ring! Please ring,' and it won't ring," she said.

While she was waiting, her health deteriorated and her skin and eyes turned yellow.

Shaemlian also had two false alarm calls from doctors thinking they had a match.

"When I did finally get the transplant, I didn't care anymore about anything," she said.

Nova Scotia was the first province to adopt an opt out system for organ donations, and countries like Spain and Croatia have the system in place where 30 people per million are donors.

Canada lags well behind these world leaders.

"We could theoretically double if we had the same performance as Spain or Croatia - we can go from 200 to 400 donors," said transplant doctor Matthew Weiss.

There are other solutions. Each donor can save up to eight lives. Sacre Coeur Hospital had a dedicated organ retrieval centre, which was hailed as a success processing four times the number of organs as other hospitals.

It closed in 2018 over doctors' salaries, but there is now a push to open it again.

According to a Transplant Quebec survey, in many cases, doctors at other institutions don't even discuss organ donation after a patient has died.

"Many of them had responses that they had not approached families and for a variety of reasons, around half of them is because they thought the family was too upset and we didn't want to upset them further," said Weiss.

Fortin's bill was put forward in Nov. 2019, but the CAQ government has not even put it on the agenda to be studied.

Shaemlian received her liver in 2018, but last year 28 patients died while waiting for an organ.

She plans to fight so others don't go through what she did.

"I'm going to do something about this if it's the last thing I do," she said. "I want to help people to not have to suffer the way I did waiting for 22 hellish months."