Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate all those who supported World Sight Day today on the steps of Parliament Hill.
Every five seconds someone in the world goes blind. Every minute, a child in the world goes blind. In the next 17 years 28 million people will go blind and of those people, 80% are preventable with good water, with vitamin A and cataract surgery.
As we degenerate in the next hour into political manoeuvring, please just reflect for a moment on what we might achieve if we were to put all that energy into curing and preventing the blindness of those 28 million people.