I can finish in one minute.

Even if everybody tested, and everybody whose house was over 200 did remediation, we'd only touch lung cancer in Canada in a minor way. So what should we do? We should and we can build radon out. The new building code, the guidance levels, and provincial adoption help but only in a minor way. It would really help if we installed fans along with this dead-end piece of plastic that's part of the new building code, vent the radon out, and have very low levels in people's houses. People wouldn't tamper with it. You'd live in a low radon house. You wouldn't have to label it. You would know it when you moved in.

It will take years before every new house in Canada has a low radon level, but at least our children and grandchildren won't have this scourge. It's much more cost-effective to do that than it is to mitigate. The cost is much lower per house, and it will have long-lasting effects on the house itself.

What should we do? We should adopt a population approach, look at the whole population and not just the people who have a lot of radon in their houses. We should question the current guideline and lower it to as low as reasonably possible. We should legislate radon-resilient building stock, so we could build radon out of new buildings. People who live in existing houses will say, “How come my neighbour has this house? I want that too.” That would be the best encouragement for people themselves to test and remediate.

We should use provincial authorities for day care centres, schools, and workplaces to emulate what goes on there in our own houses, and we should integrate the anti-smoking and radon-lowering messages, because if we have no smoking and no radon, we will have almost no lung cancer, the number one cause of cancer deaths in this country.

That's the message. Thank you for hearing me.

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