Today is Canada Day.
It’s Canada’s 147th birthday, and it is a day for celebration.
This is a day to celebrate everything that is good about this country – and that’s a lot to celebrate, because by anyone’s standards and regardless of the yardstick used, Canada is at or near the very top of any list of the very best countries in the world.
Like any birthday, this is also a good day to take positive note of things that we could improve as the clock ticks through our next year.
We’re not going to get into a lot of nitpicking here, but we’re going to make one suggestion for one improvement that could make an important difference throughout the world.
Really, it’s a follow-up to a suggestion made by Langley Advance reporter and columnist Matthew Claxton recently [Canada could eliminate cancer, June 19 Painful Truth, Langley Advance].
The headline of his column says it all: Canada could eliminate cancer.
It’s not a far-fetched idea.
As Claxton noted, it could be Canada’s equivalent to America’s moonshot of the 1960s.
Canada is already a world leader in cancer research and awareness, thanks in no small part to Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope, which was aimed at raising just one dollar per Canadian at the time, but which has snowballed into world-wide Fox Runs that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
Canada could pick up the ball that cancer took from Terry’s hands in Thunder Bay in 1980, and run it past the finish line in a massive – but doable – effort.
Like the moonshot, the benefits and economic side-effects of such a shot aimed at the heart of cancer would far outweigh any cost of the attempt.
Canada Day is a great time to celebrate and to count our blessings – and overcoming cancer would be a great blessing to add to the list.
– B.G.