Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate.
I know I am not supposed to say these sorts of things, but let me turn and acknowledge my good friend from Etobicoke North for introducing the bill. I greatly appreciate it. I thank the hon. member in my father's name.
May father died from MS. If he were still alive, he might not have been able to have this treatment because of the type of MS he had. He had what is colloquially known as rampaging MS, which means he never plateaued. He continually got worse along a continuum that looks like a curve going straight up to the sky. After being diagnosed, his last 10 years of his life was a misery. Along with that misery came acceptance. As he once told me, “Someone dealt me some cards and this is the hand I have to play, but no one dealt the hand for your mother. She has to play the same hand I have because she is my life partner”.
That is what this is about. It is about saying to families like mine that there may be hope and that we should find out if there is. We are not sure; this is not an absolute. In life we hear the old adage about absolutes: death and taxes.
My father was happy to pay his taxes from the time he turned 14 and went to work in Ireland, and he was happy to pay them in this country when he showed up in 1962. However, he died too young because of a disease for which we had no cure. Along that continuum, the quality of his life depreciated because there were no other treatments.
If he were alive today, he would say to me, “This treatment will probably not help me, but it ought to be available to someone else who may be helped by it”. He would say that because of what he and we knew his life was: a living hell.
This was a man who worked all his life from the time he was a boy. He went to the shipyards as a boy. He was 14 years old. He came to this country because he ran out of work in place where there was no longer any, and so he brought his family here, including me. When it came time for him to enjoy the last part of his life with my mother, his life partner, in retirement, he was robbed of that and so was she because of this disease.
There are colleagues, both in this Parliament and the last Parliament, whose family members are afflicted in the same way, maybe not to the same degree as my father was, but who indeed suffer from MS.
My friend from York South—Weston told me earlier about his brother, and I know there are other members on the other side who also have family members with MS. They should do this for them. They deserve that. They deserve no less than that.
We have an opportunity, not to wave a magic elixir, because there is none, but there is a clinical trial that has been requested and we should do it.
We literally have thousands of folks, Canadians who have left this country to have the procedure in other countries around the world. Now that they have come home, we can study them. We can see how they are doing. We can see where they were before, because they were being given the usual treatment regime: drugs. Drugs, between morphine and all the others he had to take to try to numb his pain, basically numbed my father into a semi-comatose state half the time. Do not let other have to suffer this. Do not let them have to go through what he did.
I do not wish anyone else the life I had in watching the one my father had to lead. It was agony for us to watch, let alone the agony my father endured as an individual, as stoic as he was. He had bruises from one end of his shin to the other because he kicked the coffee table so much to make that pain worse than the pain of MS.
Here we have an opportunity to say to people, “We want to give you a chance”. That is all it is, a chance, no more than that. It is a glimmer of hope, no more than that.
The one thing my dad and all other MS sufferers over the decades never had was hope. They knew when they were diagnosed, that was it. The best the MS Society, and all the other folks who do the good work they do, could give them was drug therapy.
I watched my mother become an advocate like I have never seen before. Members should see what happens to a little Scottish woman when she decides that her life partner is going to get the best care she can possibly find. They would not want to get between her and it, if she thought her man should have it. There is no way in the world anyone could get between them. If anyone tried, that person would get run over. All four feet, eleven inches of her would knock a dozen people down and the next dozen as well.
My mom would tell my dad's physician that she wanted my dad to have the treatment that she had found on the Internet, treatment that was being done in Europe and South America, even though the physician said it would not work for my dad. She would tell the physician that he had not idea, because he was shooting in the dark.
That is what physicians do with MS patients. They will tell patients to try this or that because it might work, but they do not know for sure because they cannot measure it. The next time a patient has an attack, the physician does not know if the patient is any better off or if the attack is less serious than the previous one. They do not know because doctors cannot measure it.
MS is a symptomatic disease. There certainly are things that happen. People end up in wheelchairs and constantly have pneumonia. They eventually end up with congestive heart failure. If they are lucky like my dad they will manage to survive the first attack, even if they have no resuscitation order in place. My dad managed to get through that attack. How many others did not? How many others have died because we did not give them some hope? How many others are giving up?
Some of those with MS are young people. My dad used to say that he was lucky because he got MS late in life. He would see others, vibrant young folks in their twenties and thirties with it, whereas he was diagnosed when he was nearly 60 years old. He said he was the lucky one. I do not know how he ever had the courage to say he was the lucky one to have MS late in his life. I do not have the faintest idea how, but he did. I do not think anyone can be lucky, regardless of the age they get it at. It is not a lucky life to have.
However, what we can do for those folks who are suffering is to give them some hope. We should not let them give up, because that is what happens with this disease. It saps the energy out of them. It eventually saps the life out of them. It dulls any sense someone has about going forward. People with MS have no sense that they can go forward, because they know what the end will be. The journey along the road to the end is literally a living hell.
We must give them some hope; that is all we are asking for. The bill asks no more than for us to say, let us do the proper science. It is not about voodoo. It is not about snake oil. It is about doing the proper science. It is about ensuring that the treatment is adequate and correct for those who need it, because not every sufferer will fall into the protocol. They know that. There are lots of them out there who think this treatment will not work for them and that they should not get it. Not all of them are saying they want it, just that they hope this is something that will help. There is no question about that. All one has to do is to talk to them.
I was in the grocery store the other day with my wife, and a couple came by whom I thought I recognized. Sure enough it was the couple I thought I knew. The wife had been to South America to have the treatment. The last time I had seen her she was using a walker. This time she was walking. Her husband was pushing the buggy with the groceries in it and she was walking beside him without any assistance.
That is why we should give these people hope. That is why we need to support the bill.
