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—