For individuals, it's going to be extremely difficult. One of the parts I didn't get to in my brief, because I was too long-winded—I'm sorry about that, Chair—is that we really need to adopt a different mindset, specifically when we're talking about historical exposures.

We're not going to find what people were exposed to. We're not going to be able to test them and be able to say that they were exposed to this and we now know that. We're going to have to work on the basis of what is referred to very succinctly in the PACT Act in the United States as presumptive diagnoses. That is, you get this diagnosis, and we know you were in such and such an area. We're going to put those two together. We're going to presume that it was caused by that.

Physicians as a whole, I would say, are not very interested in causality for the most part. We diagnose people, we treat them for their diseases, and we move on. Causality is a very nebulous concept in some ways, and it's also extremely difficult to prove. There's something in epidemiology called attributable risk fraction. I'll quickly give you an example. We know that asbestos, for example, causes lung cancer, not the thing that everyone talks about, which is mesothelioma. That's a done deal.

If you have a mesothelioma, we know that's because of asbestos, because it's about the only cause. If you have lung cancer and you're a pack-a-day smoker, or you worked in a bar where you were exposed to second-hand smoke, I have no idea how much was caused by your smoking habit, how much was caused by the fact that you worked in a smoky bar, or how much was caused by your being exposed to asbestos in your work. There is no scientific or medical way to tease those things out. We have to, for historical purposes, work on a presumptive diagnosis and presume that people were exposed. We're going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and we're going to look after them from that point of view.

Going forward, I guess there might be some hope that electronic health records will solve some of this. We also need to make sure, though, that those electronic health records can talk to each other, which is a huge problem. I think that, in Ontario, there are 12 different vendors of electronic health records, and those electronic health records don't talk to each other, even though they're supposed to all meet the same standard, which, by the way, is HL7. It's the international standard for communicating health information electronically.

I think that's part of the solution. The other part is that we need to tighten up on looking after the families. I don't know if we call it a shame, but it's certainly a real hole in our system that we don't look after the families of uniformed members, because they're moving the same number of times as the members are. Up until—

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