Evidence of meeting #64 for Veterans Affairs in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was study.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:30 a.m.
Conservative
Eve Adams Conservative Mississauga—Brampton South, ON
Are you able to share more about what steps the Canadian Forces takes with respect to health monitoring?
9:30 a.m.
Senior Advisor, Toxicology, Forces Health Protection, Canadian Forces Health Services, Department of National Defence
In general, I do know, surrounding deployment anyway, that CF members fill out a pre-deployment health survey. After they deploy they fill out another one. They meet with their physician to discuss any kind of new adverse health issues they're feeling, and then a treatment is provided to them, regardless of the reason they might feel ill.
9:35 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
Thank you very much, Ms. Adams. I appreciate that.
Dr. Lalonde, thank you very much.
It's the chair's prerogative to ask you one question. I understand in a scientific study you need at least a minimum of 200 samples in order to come to some sort of conclusion as to what may or may not be the cause of a particular issue. Are you aware of any reports out there or any analysis, from the Gulf War to Bosnia to Afghanistan, of the civilian or military population who may have passed on since then, any autopsies being done on a mass basis on these individuals to determine possible exposure to DU or uranium levels or anything else of that nature? I notice most of the samples are done by urine testing and things of that nature. Has there been any sort of large analysis on autopsies on these individuals to determine what may have caused their premature deaths? Are you aware of any study of that nature?
9:35 a.m.
Senior Advisor, Toxicology, Forces Health Protection, Canadian Forces Health Services, Department of National Defence
Linked with depleted uranium, no, I'm not.
9:35 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
Okay. Thank you very much, Dr. Lalonde.
On behalf of the committee and our regular chairperson, Mr. Kerr, who couldn't be with us, unfortunately, we thank you very much for your testimony today and we wish you the very best. Thank you.
9:35 a.m.
Senior Advisor, Toxicology, Forces Health Protection, Canadian Forces Health Services, Department of National Defence
Thank you.
9:35 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
We'll recess for one minute to transfer to our next witness and say a proper goodbye.
Thank you.
9:40 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
Thank you very much.
We're very pleased to welcome Rosanne and Steve Dornan from the beautiful province of Nova Scotia.
I just want to put on the record that your own member of Parliament, Greg Kerr—Greg is their member of Parliament—unfortunately, as you know, can't be with us. We hope he comes back very soon. We're very pleased that the two of you have made the trip up here. I know the weather out of Nova Scotia wasn't conducive to travel, but we're very pleased to see you here.
Susan Riordon, who was also on our list as well, unfortunately couldn't make it. She's the wife of a deceased veteran, Terry Riordon. She's from the Yarmouth area.
Unfortunately, she couldn't be here, but we're very pleased that the two of you are here with us.
Please proceed if you wish.
9:40 a.m.
Rosanne Dornan As an Individual
Good morning.
My name is Rosanne Dornan. I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to speak here today. I'm the wife of Steven Dornan, who is here with me.
Steven retired two years ago this month after a 27-year career in the military. He served in both Bosnia and Afghanistan, and he actually did one part of these tours while on oral chemotherapy. I want to be clear on our focus today because there seem to be two issues: is depleted uranium causing Gulf War illness, or is depleted uranium causing lymphatic cancers, or that type of thing? Because Steven does have lymphatic cancer, we will be mostly addressing the DU-cancer link.
He was medically released due to his diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and was awarded a pension for medical mismanagement, although we claimed for depleted uranium exposure causing or attributed to his cancer. This award was only settled after I staged a three-week sit-in at Greg Kerr's office in our local area.
Our personal lives and struggles with Veterans Affairs Canada and the Government of Canada are documented in the large amount of paperwork we've given you today. Of particular interest, which contains most of our background, is a letter or an e-mail that Minister Peter MacKay, the Minister of National Defence—and I think you have a copy of that, it's marked section 6, item 2—
9:40 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
I'll just put you on hold for one quick second. We did receive over 390 pages of documents from your folks, and we greatly appreciate that. Of course, the challenge was getting it translated for committee in order to be legally presented to the committee.
Our analyst is going through those documents and pulling out the very pertinent ones. Eventually he'll be working through the entire analysis to come to some conclusions so that the committee can have it in the near future.
Thank you so much.
9:40 a.m.
As an Individual
Certainly. Then you don't have it, but when you do get it, it offers a lot of background. It was a very in-depth conversation with Minister MacKay.
Our story is public, was public, and will always be public. There has been no redaction in any of the papers we've given you.
I'd like to begin here. Captain Terry Riordon: positive test for depleted uranium; Pascal Lacoste, positive test for uranium; Frank Stansbury, positive test for depleted uranium; Captain Terry Riordon, dead; Master Warrant Officer John Michael Peace, dead; Sergeant Larry Robertson, dead; Corporal Ken Burneau, non-Hodgkin lymphoma; Sergeant Larry Robertson, non-Hodgkin lymphoma; Master Warrant Officer Steve Dornan, non-Hodgkin lymphoma; and Corporal Dave Sherbanowski, Hodgkin lymphoma.
All of these men with lymphatic cancer were under the age of 40 when they were diagnosed with lymphoma. It's a very unusual age to be diagnosed, as the median age for being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma is 66. Are there more who we don't know about? We may never know, as Veterans Affairs Canada does not keep such records.
All of these men were either in the first Gulf War or Bosnia, or they served on Canadian ships where depleted uranium weaponry was proven to be used. Contrary to what Dr. Morisset said, that Canadians never used depleted uranium weaponry, it was used in testing—never in battle, but it was used in testing.
I have more names in my personal database. We've been doing this for 10 years; we know this stuff: more men and women who know they have been exposed to depleted uranium while serving in the Canadian military and are sick, dead, or dying.
There are some things I'd like you to think about. First, how does our government explain this? Surely this group cannot be considered a coincidence or, as Dr. Lalonde has suggested, a sporadic event. There are too many common factors for that. My second question is, how is it that my database of these men and women exists and no such database is available within Veterans Affairs Canada? To add to my last question, why are Canadian Forces members and veterans who self-report or are tested at their own expense not included in any database or Canadian cohort study, especially when the results are positive? Why doesn't Veterans Affairs Canada or our government pay for this DU testing at an external, non-governmental laboratory with mass spectrometry equipment sensitive enough to detect depleted uranium and isolate 238U, 235U, and 234U isotopes?
Lastly, how can such a report as this one we are here today discussing be written and not take into consideration those who have died, been diagnosed with cancer that is rare in young men, or have test results that state that they have been contaminated with depleted uranium? How can it be written without consideration of major animal studies or their results?
Had this been done, the argument presented to you in this report—and I quote from the report—that “It is unlikely that Canadian soldiers have been exposed to levels of depleted uranium which could be harmful to their health”, would be heard with much more skepticism.
As for this report, I personally feel it is imbalanced, incomplete, misleading, and lacking in objectivity. You're not getting the whole story. You're getting what they want you to hear. Soldiers are dead. Test results are positive and depleted uranium is very likely the culprit. We have met the benefit of doubt.
Our son is in the military and we need to know that he and his wife, who is also in the military, won't have to go through what we did.
I just want to speak to something Peter MacKay said about autopsies. We have prepared, when Steven does pass away, to have an autopsy, a bone marrow—
9:45 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
May I correct you on that? You said “Peter MacKay”. Are you referring to me?
9:50 a.m.
As an Individual
Yes, certainly.
We have arranged for that in our wills. Steven's bone marrow, bones, etc., will be autopsied in a lab in England. We have arranged for that.
9:50 a.m.
NDP
9:50 a.m.
As an Individual
Thank you.
Thank you for listening. I look forward to your thinking about some of the questions I've asked.
March 21st, 2013 / 9:50 a.m.
Steve Dornan As an Individual
Yes, absolutely, and being the good former sergeant major, I'm going to do a little PowerPoint here as well.
One of the things I want to point out that was overlooked with regard to other soldiers who have had investigations with regard to this is that another soldier from the U.K., a Mr. Stuart Dyson, went before a court and a hearing. After he passed away, he was awarded a complete pension by the British, relative to depleted uranium. So apart from the Italians, there is another one, which is British.
To begin, I'm a veteran who is considered to be statistically insignificant. That's it, flat out. Rosanne and I are not doctors, but we've been doing this for 12 years now. We completed the database, which the subcommittee actually came to us for, and that database is 70 pages long. It is peer-reviewed scientific research on depleted uranium everywhere.
We see some of that in this report here, but it's not complete. It's cherry-picked, and that is a big problem. We know this subject. We believe this is not a balanced report, and I think some of your questions point that out. We also don't have a dog in this fight. I have a pension, so I'm not here to get anything out of this. My cancer will kill me: I have terminal cancer, late stage.
In regard to questions I asked of the scientific community, one was about the potential health effects of depleted uranium, and they answered it. It is potentially harmful, all right. We all accept that. The World Health Organization has come out and said that it is a confirmed class one known cancer to humans, by name, “depleted uranium”.
Here's my question to you people: how do you deal with me, the one-off, the guy who was actually in the vehicle, breathing in the depleted uranium? Because that's what I did. I was a weapons inspector. Were there huge numbers of Canadian Forces members exposed? Probably not, but there were individuals who were, individuals like me and like those whose names were read out to you. The problem is that Veterans Affairs looks for cause and effect, and if you can't prove cause, there is no effect. It's a yes or a no.
So where are we?
In August 2012, Health Canada: level of risk depends on exposure and solubility. When depleted uranium burns, there are two types of oxides from it, soluble and insoluble. Not only does the World Health Organization classify depleted uranium as a confirmed human carcinogen, but so do the NTP, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and OSHA, which works very closely with the labour program. They all agree. It's in the MSDS, the material safety data sheet, for depleted uranium. It is a carcinogen—simple.
I will read for you from the Royal Society report, which was cited:
The greatest exposure to radiation resulting from inhaled DU particles will be to the lungs and associated lymph nodes, and an increased risk of lung cancer is considered to be the main radiation risk. Using worst-case assumptions the predicted radiation doses to the thoracic lymph nodes are about ten times higher than those to the lungs....
If you had that written in that report, that would give it some balance. It was one of the reports cited, but anything that leads to depleted uranium and cancer is not there.
The last one here, which is very interesting, actually, from September 2010, was done by the French. They decided to compare apples to apples: let's look at the workers in uranium and let's look at workers in uranium reprocessing facilities. What they found was something completely different, and it was the first time they found it. They found that the highest risk was observed around workers exposed to slowly soluble reprocessed depleted uranium or uranium oxide. This study is the first that differentiates between natural and reprocessed uranium, and there is an increased risk of lung and hematological malignancies. The cancers tend to increase with decreasing solubility of uranium compound and the nature to which you were exposed to it.
That is a huge change, because up until then it had always been that we didn't have enough studies on humans, so it was, “Let's look at uranium workers.” They were actually looking at uranium workers within a reprocessing facility. They looked at all of them over a long period and this was the conclusion they came to.
The VAC scientific committee said there is limited evidence of increased risk of cancer mortality. What does that mean? The context of government scientific committees conducting these has to follow the monograph. The World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer, IARC, which is cited repeatedly through this document, actually lists what that means. What does “limited evidence of carcinogenicity” mean? There are four levels, from highest to lowest.
The first level, “sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity”, means you dropped somebody in a vat of plutonium and they've died. That is cause-effect.
The second level is that we know there's enough out there and a causal interpretation is considered by the work group to be credible, and that's reflected its first conclusion.
Three is “inadequate evidence”, and four is “evidence suggesting a lack of carcinogenicity”. Prior to this study, Veterans Affairs was of the opinion that we were at three or four, which was that DU is not harmful, with an asterisk after it, and at the bottom it said, “unless inhaled or ingested”, and that was it. That was what we waged a 10-year campaign against. It has now moved from a level four to a level two with this report. What it is saying is, yes, you can get cancer from this. That's what it says.
In the context of the Canada Pension Act, which is what we have to work with at Veterans Affairs, we have what's called presumptive causation under paragraph 21(3)(g), which deals with exactly what we're talking about here today. It's depleted uranium exposure that might reasonably have caused the disease or injury or the aggravation thereof. I noted that the mandate the Veterans Affairs scientific committee had left the last part off. All it looked at was cause. When you're doing a cause and effect, does depleted uranium cause cancer? It causes cancer about as much as smoking causes cancer. If you use the smoking analogy, if you took one puff on one cigarette, that would be the cause, and the effect would be cancer, but that's not what happens. The longer you're exposed, the more you're exposed, the higher the risk of developing cancer. That's what that deals with. This report dealt very little with risk.
Let's look at what the U.S. does. In the U.S., I would have a pension simply because I have cancer and I was in an area where depleted uranium was used. If I were a federal government employee working in any of the reprocessing facilities and developed cancer, and if had one of the 22 cancers the U.S. lists, I would be compensated and looked after. Because I'm a Canadian...we spend 10 years trying to prove this, only to be told, “It's not the absolute cause; therefore, you can't have a pension.” That's what we're faced with as veterans.
The U.S. has spent $8.3 billion to date on compensation for DU workers and veterans like myself. In our packet we actually provided the links to the U.S. veterans administration sites that clearly list depleted uranium by name as ionizing radiation, and veterans are entitled to a pension in the U.S. So why is Canada so different? What makes us so different?
I listened intently to the previous speaker tell how Canadians weren't exposed. Was there a big group not exposed? No, there wasn't. Was I? That's what the VRAB actually said. After 10 years of arguing, it actually admitted, “Yes, you were.” I was a weapons inspector inside vehicles at Han Pijesak and Hadzici, the two listed in the UNEP report, with areas that have 100 times the normal levels of uranium. That was 10 years after the fact. I was there months after. I was in the vehicles, full of the dust, doing weapons inspection, as the only Canadian there, which makes me basically insignificant. You can see from the picture that, yes, we didn't have any protective equipment, respirators, gloves, things that are required by the Canadian Forces and other agencies.
What does DU look like?
That is what it looks like on a lung. Do you see the stars? That's not normal. That's what individual particles of DU do to lungs. So make no mistake, it's not harmless. It is cancerous, and it is mutagenic, they've now discovered.
In this study—this was the French study, by the way, that was not referenced, and when you asked, it was not put forward—it says, “Hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals for mortality from lymphoid and hematopoietic tissue malignancies....” This is on humans, by the way. This isn't animals; this is humans.
Up until now, until this report, natural uranium was considered the same as depleted uranium. We now know that's not true. You see natural uranium on the left, reprocessed uranium on the right. “F”, “M”, and “S” is fast, moderate, and slow solubility. These two charts should be the same and they're not—dramatically not.
10 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
We're up against the clock here. If we could wrap up, we'll be having questions from the members and possibly a lot of your continued summarization will be in answers.
10 a.m.
As an Individual
How do you get there? Presumptive causation. We already have the mechanism within the Pension Act to do this. It's already done by the U.S.; it's already done in Canada. That's how ALS is listed as a presumptive cause. For the one-offs, like myself, and the people who worked with depleted uranium as Canadian Forces members, this is the only way we will ever get treatment and a pension through Veterans Affairs. This way is the only way.
Might I take your questions?
10 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Peter Stoffer
Mr. Dornan and Mrs. Dornan, thank you both very much for your presentation. I will go on to questions here.
The New Democratic Party will be starting first. I believe it is Mr. Chicoine, please.
10 a.m.
NDP
Sylvain Chicoine NDP Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I wish to thank the witnesses who are here with us today.
Mr. Dornan, Ms. Dornan, thank you for coming and sharing with us your perspective on this issue.
Since the beginning of the study – some sessions have already been dedicated to it – some veterans have told us they are sure that their health problems are linked to depleted uranium. Other witnesses have affirmed that, according to the studies they checked, it was possible almost certainly to dismiss the possibility that depleted uranium might be the source of the veterans’ problems.
You were here earlier. You heard the testimony given by the toxicology expert. She said that, after the 2000s, veterans and military personnel were given the opportunity to have their urine tested by a firm. This firm, which she named, analysed the results and prepared a urine toxicology study.
Were you able to take part in that study or undergo those toxicological tests?