Madam Speaker, it is a real honour for me to rise tonight and speak on this motion.
I would have thought that there were certain issues in this House beyond the cynical take the money and run politics of the separatists, but obviously not. I do believe that this is an issue that rises above party politics. It rises above the provincial bickering that we see time and time again, because we are speaking about an issue that we need a national strategy for. I do not think it is a strategy that we are talking about putting a name to simply to say “we support this”. We need a comprehensive strategy to deal with Alzheimer's. It has to bring together the provinces. It has to bring together the national government.
It strikes us on so many fundamental levels. For example, a national strategy must look at pharmacare. It must look at the access to drugs, especially for low income people.
It has to look at accessibility to home care and the lack of home care we see in communities where old people are left without anyone to come in and see them.
We have to talk about tax credits. We have to talk about the financial impacts on families, which they are suffering day after day. Tax credits are part of that strategy.
We also have to talk about research. Research is something that we do need on a national level, because the impacts of this disease and the cause of this disease are what we have to look at.
I would like to say that for my own part in my riding of Timmins--James Bay I have been very active, as has my provincial counterpart, with the elder abuse awareness program in the Cochrane district, because we know that the devastating emotional impact Alzheimer's has on families is intricately tied to elder abuse.
In our region we brought together numerous stakeholders. I think it is a good example of where we can go in terms of who has to be brought into this. We are working now with the VCARS organization, community home care, the Red Cross, the Ontario Provincial Police, Timmins Community Policing, and the Golden Manor, which is an old age home in our region.
We have the legal clinics involved now. One of the fundamental aspects of elder abuse is financial abuse because elders are no longer able to look after their own resources. Now we are asking to bring in the banks, because it is a fundamental job of the banks, a fiduciary obligation, I would suggest, to play an important role in protecting the assets of people suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia.
We are trying to coordinate a strategy at our local level with these various groups. My office is very active and involved. I would support in any way I could moves by the government to bring in a national Alzheimer's strategy.
I would like to speak about this from a personal level. I spent my afternoons sitting in a room where the lights were always on, a room that smelled of cleanser and madness and loneliness. I spent those days with my grandfather, who was probably one of the biggest figures in my life, a man who had no formal education but a fantastic intelligence.
My grandfather spent 40 years working in the McIntyre gold mine in Schumacher, Ontario, where they pioneered the principle of forcing men to breathe aluminum dust every single day they went to work as a condition of employment. The aluminum dust was sent into their lungs as a way of coating their lungs; they said it was to protect against silicosis, but we knew that was not true. We knew that the coated lungs did not show up on the x-rays.
Thirty-five thousand miners across Ontario were forced to breathe aluminum dust for a period of 40 years. What are the effects of that? We do not know. I do not know if the damaged syntaxes in my grandfather's mind had anything to do with the aluminum he was forced to breathe, but again, this is where the area of research is so important.
In my short life, I have seen people die. I have been there for many people I have known, for family and friends, but I have never seen a death as lonely as an Alzheimer's death, because with Alzheimer's one lives alone and dies alone. It does not matter how much of the family is there; one is left alone because of the condition of the disease. With my grandfather, the worst was that he never succumbed to the balm of forgetfulness. He was acutely aware every single minute of the day of where he was: he was not where he should be.
My grandfather would sit in the old folks home and watch people sitting in chairs waiting. He wondered what they were waiting for. They were waiting to die. He used to think I was his cousin, and we were working on the day shift at the gold mine. One day he thought he was sitting in a bus station. He thought we were in Sydney to see the family and we were on our way back to Timmins. I saw him rifling through his pant pockets because he realized he did not have a ticket, nor did he have any money. He was in terror. He lived in terror in his final years and months because he never knew where he should be.
We see the effects of this disease on the family. I saw the effect it had on my grandmother and my mother, who spent so much of her life looking after this man. There was very little support. Fortunately we had a very good hospital where he finally ended up, but it was very difficult for our family to even send him there.
For families who do not have two caregivers at home or who do not have the financial support, the effects of this disease are devastating. We know that as the population ages, it will get worse. We know the change in our families with our 24/7 lives. We know we do not have the community supports that we had before to handle people with dementia.
When we talk about a national strategy on Alzheimer's, we are talking about a need to address a fundamental obligation of our society to protect and respect our elders.
I worked in the first nation communities of northern Quebec. I saw how important the elders were in that society. I see that among the people of the Mushkegowuk Cree where I work now as a member of Parliament. Respect for elders is a fundamental principle of their society and it should be a fundamental principle of ours. No one should be left alone to die of a disease like this, and no family should be left without supports.
Is this simply a matter of giving money to the provinces, then letting them go off and do their thing? I do not think so. We are dealing with a much bigger and broader issue. We need to come together on this. The New Democratic Party supports a national strategy for Alzheimer's. We need to work and bring as many people together as possible to make this work.