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.