Madam Speaker, thank you for enforcing respect in the House.
I will share a story about a constituent. His name is Sylvain. His story will illustrate why Bill C-284 is important. His situation is a bit like mine.
Sylvain is a man in his fifties. He works at a big bank. He is a very busy man. He has been wearing glasses for a number of years. Over time, he notices that his vision is not as keen as it used to be. He assumes that it is a natural part of the aging process. It seems to line up with his age.
Sylvain neglects to make an appointment with the optometrist because he is a busy man. He does not take the time to do it. He figures he will get his eyes tested someday and get a new prescription. When the time comes, he goes to his eye exam and he has to see the ophthalmologist. Unfortunately, the news is not good. He gets an alarming diagnosis: It is glaucoma.
Many people are familiar with this disease, which damages the optic nerve so that information is not properly transmitted from the eye to the brain. The way I explain it to people is that it is as if you woke up one morning and you feel as though you are looking through a straw. Sylvain was about to retire. He had plans. He was living in Montreal but was moving to the country, to the Laurentians, in my riding. He was planning to travel and go on bike rides. In the winter, he was planning to ski in the area. In the end, he had a lot less quality time and he had to set aside some of his plans.
Because of the type of glaucoma that he had and the stage of the disease, it was too late for Sylvain. Even the drugs he was prescribed could not slow the disease's progression. It was really impossible, and that is why prevention is key. There is a lack of knowledge. This disease must be prevented. It is unacceptable that people like Sylvain and many other Quebeckers and Canadians are unable to recognize the warning signs, but we cannot blame them. At the same time, if people do know the signs, then they can take action. It is also not easy to get the right information. Some people even have trouble distinguishing between a cold and the flu, so imagine trying to tell the difference between glaucoma, astigmatism or another eye problem, and yet some eye diseases can be fatal.
I mentioned at the outset that I was once in a similar position. In my early forties—some would say it was not so long ago—my eyes were fine. All of a sudden, I felt my eyesight change. My eyesight had started to deteriorate as I got closer to 40, so I got my eyes checked out. I was told that I had early-stage glaucoma. I was shocked to think that I, at 40 years old, would need laser eye surgery to prevent glaucoma. I learned afterwards that it runs in my family. My colleagues can imagine how many people fall through the cracks and cannot get surgery, like Sylvain, who now sees the world as if he is looking through a straw. I was lucky. I did not even know what glaucoma was. Even while preparing this speech, I had to read up on the disease because I was not sure of the facts anymore. That shows how ill-equipped we are as a society to recognize the major symptoms of many diseases.
I am sure that many Quebeckers in the House will talk about this. I would like to remind my colleagues of an ad that ran on television. It was a major national campaign in Quebec known as Memo-mamo. Lise Dion, a well-known Quebec comedian, was featured in these ads, which urged women to book an appointment for a mammogram and get early cancer screening. More than 60,000 women in Quebec have registered with the Quebec breast cancer screening program. That is a record in 100 years of campaigning.
It took a major awareness and education campaign for Quebec to get a breast cancer prevention policy. Women are the ones who are most commonly diagnosed with this type of cancer, which has the highest survival rate if the screening detects it in time. The same goes for the example I gave of glaucoma. It takes money to run screening and prevention campaigns. The federal government needs to be able to conduct such health campaigns in Quebec. In order for the Quebec department of health to take the necessary measures to keep Quebeckers healthy—and let us not forget that health falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of Quebec—the federal government needs to understand that the bill is important and that the Bloc Québécois supports it.