Mr. Speaker, January is Alzheimer's Awareness Month, a time to renew our efforts to be more attentive to and to better combat Alzheimer's disease, its stigma, and the heavy burden it places on the family and caregivers of the hundreds of thousands of Canadian sufferers.
In Canada, someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease every 5 minutes, and with baby boomers approaching their senior years, this rate will increase exponentially over the next few decades. Beyond the $33 billion direct cost to our economy, this disease takes a terrible physical, psychological, and financial toll on the many families who care for a loved one with a form of dementia.
Family caregivers spend hundreds of unpaid hours a year looking after loved ones with cognitive impairment. It shook the foundation of my family when my father, Mico Valeriote, developed Alzheimer's. The disease took a terrible toll, not only on his quality of life, but it also dramatically altered how my mother, siblings, and I related to him and to each other.
In his memory and the memory of so many Canadians with Alzheimer's we all know, let us be the difference this year.