Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak in favour of the motion today to develop a national strategy for major chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer and mental illness.
Some of these diseases have touched my family on a great many levels. About 40 years ago when I was just a very young man, my mother was stricken with cancer and after a valiant battle of about a year she passed away. That was my first experience with what cancer can do to an individual, to a body. It is without question one of the most insidious diseases known to mankind. It literally eats away at a person's body. To think that 40 years later we still have no real grasp as to what causes cancer and how to prevent it. It is something that is unfathomable to me.
I should say at the outset that I will be splitting my time with the member for New Westminster—Coquitlam.
That was my first experience with cancer itself. Two decades later, we had another incident in my family. My father, over a period of about two or three years, suffered two heart attacks, eventually came down with a stroke, which of course as everyone knows or should know is a form of cardiovascular disease. Ultimately he passed on after being incapacitated in a hospital for about two years. I saw his quality of life erode. He was an extremely active man. Both my parents were active.
To see the effects of these diseases on two vibrant individuals and to know that I was relatively powerless to do something to ease their pain is something that will never leave my memory. It is something that I feel strongly about. We need to be doing something to prevent these major diseases in every capacity.
My brother, who is only 13 months older than me, suffered a stroke about four or five years ago. It was a minor stroke luckily. He has basically fully recovered, but again this is something that stems from family history. One of the things we need to be looking at in our overall strategy to prevent these major diseases is the cause of some of the diseases. None of my family had all of the typical indicators of either heart disease or strokes. None of my family members were smokers, had high cholesterol or were overweight, all of which are typical indicators of people who may be ripe candidates for a heart attack. We did not have that.
The most personal, I suppose, and most closely related impact that heart disease had on my life was on January 12 of this year when I suffered a heart attack. It was one that was certainly unforeseen by me. I spent five days in the hospital. I am on medication now that probably will maintain my hopefully healthy and long lifestyle over the course of the next 30 or 40 years, but again, it was something that happened to me that was totally unexpected. I had no cholesterol problems to speak of and I certainly did not have a weight problem. My blood pressure, according to my cardiologist at least, was equal to that of a 16 year old well-conditioned athlete. Yet no one could possibly have predicted it other than the fact that I had a family history of heart disease.
I understand the effects that these diseases have on people's lives. I should add one humorous aside so people do not think my life is filled with tragedy. After my heart attack on January 12, it happened to be the same day that the leader of our party was coming to Regina. I actually met him at the airport around noon. He went on to one of his first events. I told him at that time I was supposed to go with him but I said that I would catch up with him later because I had to do something.
I checked myself into the hospital at which time I was told that I was right in the middle of a heart attack. I was taken up for surgery. I give great credit to all of the nurses and doctors, and my cardiologist who worked on me. In 14 minutes they had done an angioplasty and put a stent in my heart. It was an amazing procedure, but the humorous part of all of this was that the leader did not know anything about this until he found out later in the day that I had suffered a heart attack.
The humorous part was that the next morning the newspaper reported that the leader of the PC Party was visiting Regina and a local member suffered a heart attack. I am not sure whether the media truly grasped the enormity of his visit or the enormity of my disease but, in any event, we both had a good laugh about that.
Because of the closeness of some of the diseases that have struck my family, I believe very strongly that we need to develop a national strategy for major diseases. That is what this motion calls for.
There has been proof around the world that if one develops a comprehensive national strategy, it works. We see examples in the U.K., Austria, Australia and Finland where those countries that have employed and created national preventative strategies for major chronic diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, the rate of incidents in those countries for these major diseases has gone down dramatically.
Yet, Canada has no such strategy. We have talked about it for years, but we have done nothing. I think that is, quite frankly, shameful. For this country, the greatest country in the world in my estimation, which is losing so many people every year to heart disease, cancer, to sit back and do nothing about taking positive steps that have been proven worldwide to be effective and that work, is shameful.
However, I take this opportunity to suggest that now we have an opportunity to put some funding, some real money into a national strategy that would work, that would prevent disease and treat those who have incurred disease in order to save lives. That is the bottom line. This strategy would have the effect of saving lives. I do not think that anyone could put an adequate dollar value on what it means to save Canadian lives. This is not something that we should be debating. This is something we should have done years ago.
Although it may be too late to save those people like my father and mother, it is not too late to save people in future generations. I do not want this for my own health, although that is very important to me, I want this for my sons. We have a family history of heart disease and cancer. I want my sons to live in an environment where they have a fighting chance to prevent those diseases before they impact and affect my sons, and my grandsons and granddaughters.
We do not know enough about cancer and we certainly do not know enough about heart disease to determine what causes these major diseases.
Everyone always thought that it was the indicators I had mentioned previously that caused things like heart disease, for example, if a person was overweight or had high cholesterol. Well, certainly, those are indicators. If people were smokers, that would cause them, in many respects, to have heart attacks and develop heart disease. However, those are not the only indicators. I had none of those. My family had none of those indicators. Yet, we still developed these major diseases. Why? No one can tell me that.
We need to develop a strategy that would bring together all the major stakeholders and organizations like the Canadian Cancer Society and the Heart and Stroke Foundation. We need to get them, in a coordinated fashion, to share information in order to develop ideas that would be communicated to Canadians across this country. We need this group to tell Canadians some of the things that they perhaps could be doing to prevent heart disease and cancer, and also to develop a research environment to answer the questions that we have long been asking. What causes cancer? What causes chronic heart disease?
This is not something that we should be sitting here and debating. We should all be coming together as parliamentarians and saying that it has to be done. Let us get it done. Let us put the funding forward. Let us not argue. Let us not debate. This is not a political issue. This is a matter of life and death.