According to Health Canada, 45,000 Canadians quit smoking every year — by dying.

Our federal health authority does not word it that way, of course, but that’s the bottom line when it comes to smoking-related deaths.

It kills one in five of us, which is roughly five times the number of deaths purportedly caused by car accidents, suicides, drug addictions, homicides and AIDS combined — with approximately 50% of those deaths happening before the smoker hits the age of 70.

This, of course, is all old news, part of a well-worn loop tape used by all health organizations and anti-smoking advocates to scare us into quitting.

But here’s the question: Will you — and hopefully me — be among the four who escape death by smoking?

Or will we be among the one out of five who cash out early, with cancer being the biggest concern?

There is a way to find out.

The Terry Fox Research Institute, co-funded by the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, in conjunction with Princess Margaret Hospital, is looking for participants in a research study first launched in 2008.

All you have to do is call 1-866-866-4922.

The call could save your life.

To qualify for this pan-Canadian study into the early detection of lung cancer, you have to be a smoker or a former smoker who has smoked for 30 years or more, and be between the ages of 50 and 75.

You do not have to live in Toronto.

Two years ago, while watching television and having a smoke, I saw an advertisement asking for the same sort of volunteer.

I called up, and got in.

I suspect I was hoping for a scare, something non-lethal (obviously) that would convince me to quit smoking yet again, this time for good.

Some bad news, good news, so to speak — the bad news being that I might have a small spot on my lung, but the good news being that it was caught at its earliest stage.

Fortunately for me, there was no bad news. Despite being a smoker since my late teens, my lungs had somehow survived the years of on-and-off assault without considerable damage.

Unfortunately for me, however, the lack of bad news means I have yet to quit smoking, although I have cut down measurably and am in the process of preparing for another quit attempt.

Without question, this study will provide you with a precise tale of the tape, and it goes far beyond the normal chest X-ray.

Try getting a CT scan by going through your family doctor, just to see how your lungs are faring after years for smoking.

Trust me, it won’t happen.

This opportunity is therefore an opportunity not to miss, especially since it is not one-off but has two followups, each a year apart.

A CT scan, by the by, is to a traditional X-ray what a BMW 740i is to a K-car.

There is no comparison.

A CT scan, or computerized tomography, makes three-dimensional images from two-dimensional X-rays to create cross-sectional pictures of the body. In this case, the lungs.

A technician at Princess Margaret described it as like looking at a loaf of sliced bread.

“You can see the whole loaf, and you can also see its individual slices, and see everything inside each one,” she said.

In other words, a CT scan misses nothing.

Last November, scientists performed CT scans on 22 mummies housed at the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, and discovered that rich Egyptians living 3,500 years ago likely had the same clogged arteries that modern North Americans now battle.

A while back, Maureen McGregor, director of the study, bought a newspaper ad to recruit study participants but came up with only a handful of respondents.

A similar ad, currently seen along the subway system, has also failed to turn up the numbers needed.

Perhaps this column will.

The clinics are held Tuesday morning at Princess Margaret, and are all but painless.

You fill out Q & A forms, donate a couple of vials of blood, blow into a machine that measures lung capacity, then lie on the bed of the CT scan and, within three minutes, the scan is done and you’re on your way.

No matter what the results, your personal doctor will be advised of the study’s individual findings.

“We’ve saved more than a few people’s lives because of early detection of their lung cancer,” McGregor said.

“It’s worth the phone call.”

mark.bonokoski@sunmedia.ca

or 416-947-2445

Even in death, Martin Blackwind could not get a jury of his peers to notice him.

What he got, instead, was ignored.

After an eight-day inquest in Port Hope — with an aboriginal lawyer having standing before the court, with expert testimonies giving history and perspective to First Nation discrimination within the correctional system, and with a scathing report by Corrections Ombudsman Howard Sapers already laying waste to the system in its treatment of aboriginal inmates — the inquest jury ignored the elephant in the court.

Martin Blackwind might as well have been WASP.

But he wasn’t.

He was Sioux.

But nowhere in the jury’s recommendations was the word “aboriginal” even mentioned. Nowhere in its recommedations did the jury deal with the obvious First Nations issues that Correctional Services of Canada (CSC) has been so widely criticized for refusing to wholeheartedly face.

Instead of seizing the opportunity, the jury talked about having a 24/7 nursing staff on duty at the Warkworth penitentiary where Martin Blackwind bled to death in his cell. It talked about having additional psychologists available at all times, of how better observational records should be kept, and how daily briefings might be in order.

It took all of 30 seconds to read.

But no mention was made of the big, bad Indian in the room, and how he got to where he was.

The jury, as it turned out, was a collective of three women and two men who were hardly true peers of Martin Blackwind.

All were from small-town Ontario, places like Coldsprings, Port Hope, Campbellford, Baltimore and Cobourg, all were of a generation that was either already collecting their old age pension or were about to collect it, and all were white.

So little else might have been expected from them.

Only hoped.

“I know the inquest heard expert testimony regarding the need for aboriginal-specific programming in prisons and about the impact that generations of abuse, poverty and marginalization has had on aboriginals coming into conflict with the law,” said Sapers, his comments coming within hours of reading the jury’s recommendations.

“I also know that serious allegations were raised, but not substantiated, at the time of Blackwind’s death that race was a factor in how he ended up bleeding to death in a locked cell.

“I don’t believe that the CSC ever fully dealt with those concerns, which are systemic in nature, and I am very surprised that issues relating to race and cultural sensitivity are not even mentioned in the jury’s verdict,” said Sapers.

“If the purpose of the inquest was to identify opportunities for substantive improvements and the prevention of deaths in custody, than I think it missed the point.”

No doubt few violins played when Martin Blackwind died.

He personified the stereotypical image of the “drunken Indian” — a homeless, Listerine-swilling alcoholic since his childhood in Manitoba, who slept on a hot-air vent in downtown Toronto and who, for the second time in his life, had killed a woman who shared his lifestyle, his addiction and his squalor.

Mandy Wesley, who was given standing at the inquest as a lawyer with Aborginal Legal Services of Toronto (ALST), was as mystified as Howard Sapers over how the aforementioned elephant in the room never got noticed by the jury.

“The lack of aboriginal-specific recommendations says to the aboriginal community that our voice and input into how corrections interacts with aboriginal peoples is neither wanted or heard,” she said.

“Rather than addressing the severe psychiatric and psychological issues Blackwind was dealing with in the days and weeks leading up to his death, he was sent to a range that is no better equipped than any other range at Warkworth to deal with individuals suffering from psychiatric and psychological issues.”

Mandy Wesley, in fact, presented the jury with 17 aboriginal-specific recommendations to consider.

None was adopted — despite the fact that aboriginals, as the inquest jury was told, constitute 20% of the federal prison population yet only 4% of the nation’s population.

“If aboriginal over-representation (in prisons) was a ‘crisis’ in 1999, what is it now?” asked Wesley. “There are a whole myriad of social and historical factors contributing to this over-representation, including racism.

“Aboriginal people face racism at every step of the process — from the point of arrest onward,” she said. “There is no reason to believe that this racism ceases upon entering prison.

“If anything, this is where aboriginal people are most vulnerable because they are behind stone walls, hidden from view.”

When the suicidal-prone Blackwind wound up dying in custody from a self-inficted wound, Corrections Canada issued a news release that spoke of a textbook response.

It told of how guards at Warkworth responded to an emergency cell alarm at 2:40 a.m. back on Oct. 3, 2006, how Martin Blackwind was discovered with “potentially life-threatening injuries,” and how an ambulance was called “immediately.”

What really happened was quite the opposite.

Four veteran jail guards, as laid out in Sapers’ investigation, had literally allowed Blackwind to bleed out.

An ambulance was not called until 18 minutes after the first staff member looked in on Blackwind.

And, in the 30 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive, no one moved a muscle.

When paramedics finally wheeled into the prison, they found Blackwind alone on the floor of his cell, unconscious and not breathing, and his mattress soaked in blood.

Before he was hauled off to Campbellford Memorial Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead officially, those four veteran jail guards — later punished with a dock in pay ranging from 10 to 20 days — did only one thing.

They shackled Blackwind in leg irons.

The inquest was told it was protocol.

(Saturday, January 23)

No sooner had the first penny dropped in the cry for Haitian relief than there was a government official, and the RCMP, taking up prime-time space warning us about scam artists already at work.

This is what our world is coming to.

With the Internet at their fingertips, it takes only a virtual nanosecond for these lowest of the low to set up a bogus charity site — complete with all the bells and whistles that make it appear entirely legit.

And so we give – not to the Red Cross or to the Humanitarian Coalition — but to con men.

It happened when the tsunami hit Indonesia, and it is happening now — taking advantage of the misery of Haitians and our good will — to line their pockets with ill-gotten gain.

What a sad state of affairs.

Scam artists are undoubtedly the second oldest profession in our evolution. But the snake-oil salesmen of today do not have to go out and work a vulnerable and naïve crowd.

They have the Internet.

They can sit anywhere in the world, type in a few codes and voila .... a Haitian relief charity, complete with stolen pictures (again from the Internet) of poor people burying their dead, and trying to come to grips with a future that is as grim as grim can be.

So be careful of where you go.

News organizations stress the charities listed on their websites are legitimate.

Go only there, and nowhere else.

But please go, and please give.

(Saturday, January 9)

I didn't know Michelle Lang, the Calgary journalist killed last week in Afghanistan along with four Canadian soldiers, but I knew of her.

You always hear of the good ones.

Their work is their introduction, and the news business is a competitive game.

So you know the stars.

Michelle Lang, a reporter with the Calgary Herald , was the first Canadian journalist to be killed in Afghanistan, although a good handful of others have been injured, many seriously.

In all, 17 journalists from around the world have died in that far-off part of the world – all doing their jobs, all going “outside the wire” to bring real news back to their readers and listeners, and not just the spin of the on-base military machine.

I have never been to Afghanistan, and have no desire to go there, but I have covered brutal civil wars in Africa, sectarian killings in Northern Ireland, and populist revolutions in the old Soviet Union.

Harm's way is where the story is found, and that will never change when it comes to war — which is why 138 of our soldiers did not come home in a vacuum, but with the heroics of their stories being told by journalists on the front line.

Michelle Lang was only 34 when she was killed, but she was also the perfect age to handle such an assignment — young enough to stand the strain but experienced enough to separate fact from fiction.

And that only magnifies her loss.

(Friday, January 8)

This year, and this decade, is quite possibly the most important year and decade in the modern-day history of Bancroft — all which demands focused leadership.

The Build Bancroft project is a vital component of Bancroft's future, and those who throw stones at it from the sidelines do the town no favour when the stones they throw are either misdirected or based primarily on hearsay.

So, if you want to be a critic in 2010, or you want to continue being a critic, get the facts.

Complaining's easy; contributing takes guts.

Those who think the Build Bancroft project is not vital have their heads in a snowbank, and the majority of armchair critics I've heard thus far have armed themselves with hyperbole, not facts.

As a result, I've heard a lot of very smart people say a lot of very dumb things.

And, if that is frustrating for me — a trained observer who has made a career of separating fiction from fact — imagine how frustrating it is for town council and for its administration.

This project must get done or Bancroft has no real future. That's a fact.
Like it or not, Bancroft is no longer a mining town. It is no longer a lumber town.

It is a tourist town, a struggling tourist town in dire need of a face lift and an injection of positive thought and positive action.

Secure the future. Don't derail it.