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More than two years after Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a strategy to control cancer, Canadians are signing up for a lifetime of scientific investigation as part of a decades-long study to determine who develops the disease and why.

So far, 31,000 Canadians - of the 300,000 expected - have agreed to take part in research that is not only examining ways to prevent and treat cancer, but is also probing the role of environmental contaminants in causing the disease and other chronic illnesses.

The Canadian Partnership Against Cancer (CPAC) - with a $250-million budget over five years - was announced in November of 2006 in the midst of a Globe and Mail project on cancer that catalogued the human toll of the disease and highlighted the inadequacies of the health-care system.

The deficiencies included unequal access to cancer drugs and PET technology and the failure of hospitals to meet health-accord benchmarks by radiating patients within four weeks. After the stories were published, the Conservative government was questioned in the House of Commons, with the opposition noting that cancer patients were taking out loans, racking up credit-card debt and facing financial ruin to pay for their treatment.

A coalition of cancer survivors, oncologists, agencies and advocacy groups had been pushing for such a national strategy, noting that Britain embraced one in 2000 after its incidence and death rates for the disease were deemed high for a developed country.

"Without a cancer strategy, you can't actually advance the greatest impact in terms of reducing the incidence of cancer and improving the cancer journey and reducing deaths from cancer," said Jessica Hill, chief executive officer of CPAC. "That's what cancer control means."

Cancer's toll is enormous: This year, 171,000 people are expected to develop the disease and 75,300 to die of it, according to Canadian Cancer Society statistics. Based on current incidence rates, 40 per cent of Canadian women and 45 per cent of men will develop cancer in their lifetime.

Against that grim backdrop, a cancer-control strategy carries great expectations. The 2006 announcement suggested that a national strategy could prevent at least 1.2 million Canadians from developing cancer and save 420,000 lives and more than $39-billion in direct health-care costs. CPAC was to do it by bringing together the provinces for the betterment of a single cause for decades to come.

By March 31, 2012, 300,000 participants in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada are expected to have signed up for the study CPAC is spearheading.

One of them, Janet Lockwood, had five vials of her blood taken, her bone density checked and her weight and height tallied at the Rockyview General Hospital in Calgary last month - all for research on a disease that killed her father more than a decade ago.

"I received a letter in the mail one day just saying they were going to start doing a study that would take from the time you sign up until you are dead," said Ms. Lockwood, 50, who works in report processing for the Calgary Police Service. "I kind of hemmed and hawed and I thought, 'Why not try to help any way you can?' " Ms. Lockwood's blood will be probed to see if she carries genes that may increase or decrease her susceptibility to cancer. It will be studied for long-term exposure to organochlorine compounds, such as DDT - a pesticide long ago banned but whose residues linger in virtually every human today.

Researchers will also look at any exposures she had in her jobs, where she lives, the quality of the air she breathes, how long she spends in a car each day and the amount of daily exercise she gets.

"I think we're going to find some stuff that we haven't seen before," said Richard Gallagher, principal investigator of the B.C. arm of the cohort population study. "I think we're going to find that environmental/occupational things are going to account for more cancers than we think they do, and may account for other kinds of diseases too."

There will also be work on how to prevent, screen and detect cancer. Researchers want to better understand how patients navigate the cancer system, to monitor and measure how treatment is working, and to develop a national system so that the stages of cancer are uniformly defined.

"The things that we would do to control cancer are actually no different from the things you would do to control diabetes or heart disease or pulmonary disease," said Simon Sutcliffe, vice-chairman of the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer.

According to Bill Hryniuk, past chairman of the Cancer Advocacy Coalition of Canada, who advocated for such a strategy, CPAC is the "only hope for smoothing out the differences that are preventing unnecessary deaths from cancer."