Mr. Speaker, I stand today to bring attention to a situation that affects over 86,000 Canadians today and 4,300 more Canadians every year.
I am referring to Canadians living with spinal cord injuries at great personal cost to themselves and costing billions of health care dollars every year.
Today, 25 members of this House and the other place are spending their working day in wheelchairs to get a tiny taste of the challenges that people with spinal cord injuries face in everyday activities that we take for granted. This is the annual chair-leader event, sponsored by the Canadian Paraplegic Association, and I am proud to be a part of it.
Many Canadians with spinal cord injuries have accomplished great things and have provided us with inspiration, people like Rick Hansen, athletes like Chantal Petitclerc, and our own colleagues in this House from Montcalm and Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia.
We need to do more than take inspiration from these people. We need to raise awareness of the challenges that all Canadians with spinal cord injury face and do everything we can to support treatment and, what is very important, research and development.
We have made a lot of progress, but there are many steps left not taken.