I'll start by just outlining that in order to conduct a longitudinal study like that, you need three segments of information. First, you need information about the time of exposure in their medical state, the medical state of an individual at the time of exposure. Second, you need information about their health outcomes at the end of the day. Third, we need the scientific evidence around that, showing how their individual experience compares against other large-scale studies. This is a challenge, I have to say, in the Canadian context because their health care records are maintained by the Canadian Armed Forces when they're serving, and their health records are maintained in a different jurisdiction entirely after they're released, by the provincial authority in which they live.
Due to privacy laws, we as a federal government don't automatically have access to their old health care record from the province. We can ask for information from the individual, and we can ask for information when the individual comes to us from National Defence. In terms of doing a large-scale study, we can't proactively go out and get current health outcome information from people in the general public, which includes all veterans. We can do it on an individual basis, for adjudication purposes, when they come to us and provide us with information about their own health situation. The exception is with the help of Statistics Canada, which maintains a growing set of databases around health outcomes for the general population. We cannot see individual results in the databases that are held by Health Canada, but we can do aggregate studies. The cancer incidence study that we're conducting now is an example of that.