Thank you very much.
You know, I'm in Ottawa, and my health care is given to me by the federal government but we are referred to the civilian side for a lot of the testing. I was in exactly the right place at the right time to get second-to-none care. There was intervention immediately at the Ottawa General, with radiotherapy at 2 o'clock in the morning. You show up in the afternoon, and by 2 a.m. you're getting your first treatment.
Not everybody in Canada can get that, sadly. It is very important that everybody has access to the same quality of care I had—although, even then, the chances are not on my side.
It has to be a program that says, for instance, we will not just look at the fact that you want to have testing. We will have a program, a policy, that says if you're between 55 and 74 and you have been a smoker, we think you are a high-target population and will tell you that you need to have this test done. That way, everybody who can be detected early will be. People themselves won't have to come forward and say “I think I have a little thing here”, “I'm coughing blood”, or something like that.
If it has to come from the population, from the patient, to themselves identify that they have an issue, I don't think it will work that well. It's like self-examination for breast cancer; it's fantastic, but things are missed if you don't do it right. If you have a test that exists, the low-emission CT, and you apply it to people who you know are at risk, then these are, in army terms, high-value targets in effects-based operations.