Mr. Speaker, I rise to support the motion.
There is no question that this country does not have a surveillance method for brain tumours, either benign or malignant. It is important at the beginning, because when people hear the words “brain cancer” or “brain tumour”, they think of a malignant cancer. While a benign tumour is not cancer, it nevertheless can cause a great deal of damage to an individual.
Unfortunately, people who read a bit about medical terminology may hear the word “benign” and not pay much attention, because they think benign means it is okay and they do not have to worry. For example, if someone was suspected of having breast cancer and the result of the biopsy was that the tumour was benign, the person would sigh with relief, because benign to most people means that everything will be fine.
There has been less focus in the area of benign tumours, less focus on surveillance, less focus on follow-up and less focus on the kinds of supports that need to be in place for children or adults who may be diagnosed with a benign tumour. Whether a tumour is benign or malignant, with treatment, people can be very lucky with malignant brain tumours and may do well.
With benign tumours, we know that while the tumour will not spread, it may recur and in point of fact, does recur. It is not at all uncommon. I can think of three people in my life who have recurring benign brain tumours. For at least two of those individuals, the surgery and the treatment for the benign brain tumours has caused permanent physical disability. One person has lost most vision. One person has a number of facial movement and speech disorders.
When a breast tumour is removed, damage is not done to the surrounding area. When a benign brain tumour is removed, there is the potential for damage to the surrounding area, depending on where it is, because of the closeness to all those areas that control thought, smell, sense, movement and all of that.
It is important to have surveillance on both. I thank the member for moving the motion, because most of the focus has been on malignant tumours. If surveillance is done, there is an opportunity to determine if it is consistent across the country. Are there provinces or parts of provinces where this is seen to a greater degree? The federal government needs to know that and we need to be able to share that with other provinces.
In the case of neurotubular disorders, when surveillance was done, suddenly we saw a far larger number of children with neurotubular disorders. Although one should never see any, the statistics said that we would see a larger number of children with neurotubular disorders in areas where spraying was going on.
It helps us when we look across the country to see if there are places where we need to have a closer look at the environment in which children or adults who are developing tumours live.
It provides us with an opportunity to look at what happens after treatment. We do not currently provide enough support after treatment. The benign or malignant tumour has been treated and halted but there are no support programs in place that provide for education, job retraining, any health care that might be needed because the individuals do not fit into the existing categories. They do not have particular challenges for which programs have already been developed. They are often simply at home with no support or they are out of school or have to stand back from their jobs which supported their families. There has not been a focus on post-treatment supports that those individuals would need.
I would agree strongly with the member from Dartmouth that we have a health care system in which we believe that nobody should be denied treatment. The better the surveillance that is done, the more likely we are to be able to get more causal information and the better we are able to respond not just to the tumour but to what kind of support people need after the fact.
People in rural areas obviously need more support than people in urban areas because they have to travel for their treatment. That support has to be in place.
It also allows us to look at what we see in terms of population groups. Are we seeing more adults? Are we seeing more children? What percentage of them are children under five, teenagers, or older adults? What are we seeing around age? What are we seeing around cultural background or ethnic background? Do we see more people from a particular ethnic background than another? That would let us do a far better surveillance. It would also let us know more about genetics. Do we think it is familial or not? Surveillance allows us to identify that kind of information as well and then to be able to set up in the way that we have done with other kinds of cancers and whether there is a familial characteristic to a particular kind of tumour.
This may very well require more funds, not just funds for surveillance but because programs are significantly lacking after treatment, there are going to have to be more dollars for health, education and training certainly from the federal government and perhaps provincial governments. We need to make sure that once people are identified as having particular needs, they are not one offs and they are provided with particular programs that meet their needs.
There is a funding issue. We know that provincial governments are struggling for health care dollars now. They cannot meet the needs of everybody, with rising drug costs, wait times and growing populations. Having been a health minister, I know how hard it is to meet everybody's needs within a health budget.
I would like there to be a federal government responsibility to look at surveillance in a more overall way. I do not want people to have to bring a motion to the House every time somebody has a disease on which we need to do surveillance. It is a very cumbersome and ineffective way of doing surveillance.
It is not that I do not support the member's motion; I do. In terms of how we do surveillance on illnesses across our country, I do not want it to be a one-off approach just because a member can bring forward a motion because it is important to the member. I would like the approach to be done in a more organized, systematic, efficacious way than we currently see.