Thank you, Mr. Chair.
To just follow up on some of what my colleague, Dr. Ellis, stated, the motion I moved on looking at the breast cancer guidelines isn't just politics for me. This is something that is incredibly important to me. I was 21 years old when I lost my mom to cancer, and my mom was 49 years old. She was younger than what she would currently be able to get a mammogram for. In the time since I've lost my mom.... That shook our entire family. That created trauma, heartache and so much challenge for my entire family.
I remember watching my dad, who was the strongest person I ever knew, turn into a very broken man for a while after my mom died. She was the love of his life. It was breast cancer. It was something that should have been completely preventable had she simply been able to have adequate diagnostic testing available to her at an earlier age.
The Canadian Cancer Society, in fact, today put out a statement:
The Canadian Cancer Society is disappointed by the new breast [cancer] screening guidelines released today by the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) and specifically the lack of a recommendation to lower the start age to systematically screen for breast cancer nationwide.
These conversations happened as we were studying women's health. We heard from multiple witnesses about the importance of breast cancer screening earlier and about the difference between breast cancer screening when it comes to dense breasts and different breast compositions. We heard a lot about women's health, and it was something that hit me, as someone who is the daughter of a breast cancer person. It hit me that we could make an actual immediate difference in the lives of people like my mom and our family, as well as all the other families in similar situations.
Also, women's health is so understudied at the best of times. There's the fact that most people don't even want to talk about women's health and the fact that in this health committee, when we decided to study women's health, we didn't study breast cancer. We didn't study endometriosis. We literally looked at just women's health, as if somehow studying health for more than 50% of the population is an okay thing.
It really bothers me, because I can't imagine a time when we would say, you know what? Let's have a study on men's health. No, we wouldn't. We would study men's mental health. We would study prostate cancer. We would study the guidelines.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. I'll say it right now here on Hansard. If men had to put their reproductive organs into a mammogram machine as their form of diagnostic, we would already have a different test. If that were something men were subjected to, we would already have a different test. This just speaks to the systemic challenges women's health has.
Here we have an opportunity, then, to study women's health, to have conversations with the analysts and to have this conversation. Instead—