I’m pleased to rise in support of this motion. This issue is near and dear to my heart. I lost my grandmother, both my aunts on my father’s side and my aunt on my mother’s side to cancer. To this day, I believe that if they had access to early screening, their lives could have been prolonged or perhaps saved.

As part of looking into this motion, I was shocked to learn that lung cancer kills more people in Ontario than brain cancer, bladder cancer, leukemia, prostate cancer, breast cancer and stomach cancer combined. In fact, the probability of dying from cancer is highest in the case of lung cancer for both males and females.

The reason for this high probability of dying from lung cancer has to do with the fact that lung cancer survival rates vary significantly depending on the stage of diagnosis. If someone is diagnosed at stage 1, their chance of survival is 60%, and it drops to below 5% if they’re diagnosed at stage 4, when many people unfortunately are diagnosed. This underscores the importance of diagnosing lung cancer as early as possible.

One statistic that jumped out was that 70% of lung cancers in Canada are diagnosed at an advanced stage, unfortunately. That makes a difference between life and death. That means that someone’s parent or their brother or their sister or their friend might have survived and gone on to live many years of productive life, many productive years.

Lung Cancer Canada agrees that comprehensive lung cancer screening programs are essential to improving early detection rates and saving lives. While lung cancer continues to have the highest mortality rate among all types of cancer, it is more important than ever to ensure that everyone who may be at risk of developing lung cancer has access to early screening programs.

Speaker, I’m proud to be part of the government that takes health care seriously and is investing $85 billion in health care, nearly $25 billion more than the previous government. This is the government that ended hallway health care that plagued the province under the previous government. In the past five years, we’ve added over 3,500 hospital beds. We’re building 50 new hospital projects through our $50-billion investment to add 3,000 more. Since 2018, 80,000 new nurses and 10,400 new doctors have registered to work in Ontario. We were the first province in Canada to introduce as-of-right rules to allow health care workers to move to Ontario from other provinces to start working immediately.

Our government provides an organized screening program, the Ontario Lung Screening Program, that helps screen people at high risk of getting lung cancer. This program is open to people between the ages of 55 and 74 years old who have smoked cigarettes every day for 20 years and not necessarily 20 years in a row. As the House is aware, currently this program operates at four main sites: Oshawa, Toronto, Sudbury and Ottawa.

Looking into broadening the eligibility criteria for access to the lung screening program might catch cancer at earlier stages for a lot of people who today don’t have access to the screening programs. Adding another site in or around the Peel region may also provide access to people who currently don’t have access to one of the four sites.

This private member’s motion will hep us determine whether an expansion to the screening program is warranted and whether we should broaden the eligibility criteria for access to the lung screening program.

While my riding is not in the Peel region, it is adjacent to Peel, and residents of my riding and other residents of Halton travel routinely to Peel for their health care needs.

In fact, my father is in Trillium hospital right now in the Peel region, as I speak, for his angiography. My uncle was recently admitted to Credit Valley Hospital, also in the Peel region, for his cardiovascular disease.

Should Peel be selected as one of the sites for the expansion of the lung screening program, it would not only help the 1.5 million residents of Peel region but also over 600,000 people in the Halton region.

As the House is aware, both Peel and Halton are among the fastest-growing regions in Ontario. Under the provincial growth plan, the Halton region is projected to grow to 1.1 million people by 2051, and the Peel region is projected to grow to 2.28 million people.

While it is common for people in my riding and the rest of Halton region to travel to Peel for complex health care needs, the same cannot be said about travelling to Ottawa, Sudbury, Oshawa or Toronto, where lung cancer screening centres are currently. I fear that many might forgo screening that might have caught the cancer for them at an earlier stage and could have saved their lives.

Speaker, I thank the member from Mississauga Centre for her motion as well as her advocacy on this very important issue. I support this motion and urge my colleagues to do the same because better access to lung cancer screening can help find lung cancer early, which is when the treatment has the best chance of working. I’m looking forward to seeing my colleagues support this motion.

Speaker, this week, the National Council of Canadian Muslims members attended Queen’s Park, and they met with all party members. Even the Premier met with Esa, a cousin of 15-year-old Yumnah who was killed on this day three years ago, alongside with her parents and grandmother.

The Afzaal family was a target of hate just because they were Muslim. Racism and hate against the Muslim community has been getting worse. The Muslim community has gone through so much, and the terrorist attack on the Afzaal family has left the Muslim community asking, when will the members of this Legislature put words into action and address rising hate and Islamophobia?