Mr. Speaker, this is my first opportunity to speak in the House in this new session. I want to say again just how much of an honour and privilege it is for me to represent the wonderful people of Yellowhead. I cannot acknowledge it enough. I am always in awe of the awesome responsibility they have given me and the honour I feel in representing them, so I stand to proudly represent them.
I also want to say how important today's piece of legislation is. As we are speaking about it today, I want to lend my voice to some of the consideration of the legislation as it goes through the House. I want to talk about why I think it is important.
I have talked about this. We have seen exactly what has been going on with regard to this legislation. It has been an order in council since 2004 and now we are actually bringing it into the House in order to put it into legislation. It comes out of Canada's SARS experience. As well, I will talk a bit about the possible pandemic of the avian flu and whether it is or is not.
Let us get to the agency itself and what we are really talking about. We are basically talking about prevention and how we prevent health crisis situations from happening. In Canada in the last 40 years, our experience has been more about looking at crisis intervention. When there is a health crisis, people usually go to hospitals or doctors and try to find an intervention to somehow alleviate the crisis. This is not necessarily about doing that. This is about doing something before that happens.
Not only do we have to look at public health with regard to a potential pandemic or something like a SARS infection, but we have to do that in all of our health considerations, whether it is cancer, heart, diabetes or arthritis. There has been tremendous advancement in the things we can do in the area of prevention before we get into a crisis situation. If we are going to sustain our health care system in the 21st century, we are going to have to begin to be very serious about being far-sighted with regard to the health of ordinary individuals in Canada.
When it comes to this agency and protecting the public health side of things in Canada, we go through monitoring, testing, analyzing, intervening, informing, promoting and preventing until something actually happens unexpectedly, just as we saw recently in Toronto and Vancouver with the SARS situation. When we realize that a good part of what actually happened there could be prevented and that it can be very costly if it is not prevented or dealt with, then we realize that we in the House have a responsibility to do everything we possibly can on behalf of Canadians to prepare them for those situations.
This was brought home with what happened after SARS. The Kirby report talked about it, and many have talked about the Kirby report, its implications and what it recommended. It was also followed with Dr. Naylor's report, a national advisory committee report on SARS that specifically talked about what we could learn from that disease. This is what has come out of that. It is a recommendation that we actually do something with regard to prevention so that not only can we talk about the federal government and its responsibilities, but we can also understand the responsibilities that provinces and territories have with regard to this whole area of preventing individuals from getting into these crisis situations and what we can do to protect ourselves and prepare ourselves for what might be coming.
I want to spend a minute or two talking about the SARS situation, because there is a lot we can learn from what has actually happened. I want to discuss it because the Naylor report talked a lot about what the province did and what the federal government did not do. I would like to explain a little of what the government's responsibility was at the time and what perhaps did not happen.
Before SARS happened, it was Canada that actually exposed it to the world when it realized what was happening. The virus was present in Asia, in China in particular, and it was actually Canada's surveillance that alerted the World Health Organization to the problem.
It is interesting to note that Canada alerted the World Health Organization, and yet when there were two cases of SARS, one in Vancouver and the other in Toronto, they were handled completely differently and had completely different results. Officials were alerted to the case in Vancouver because the individual came from Hong Kong. All hospitals in Canada were supposedly aware of this infectious disease. In Vancouver, it instantly was treated as an infectious disease. Because of that, there was not one death, because of the way the hospitals handled it and intervened at that time.
I am not blaming the medical people at all for what happened in Toronto. I understand full well what happened. The point is this. When SARS was diagnosed in the Toronto hospital, it took medical staff 24 hours before they really understood what they were dealing with. With everything that flowed out of that 24 hour period of time, there were 44 deaths in the Toronto area. The World Health Organization put a travel advisory on the Toronto area and as a result of individuals refusing to travel to that city it suffered an economic loss of $2 billion. That was the fallout.
We can see that the timing and the way we prepared in those two cases was absolutely critical to the fallout with what actually happened with regard to human deaths and economic costs.
So why is it so important to show leadership? Because, in regard to leadership, one area reacted differently from the other. I am not blaming anyone. I am not saying that anyone was at fault. I am saying that what we should do is learn from the experience and, in this agency, understand that preventing this from happening again is critical. We should be aware of the fact that many experts around the world claim that another SARS or another pandemic is going to happen in the future. This is very valuable. What we are doing prior to this is actually critical.
No country in the world should be more prepared and more understanding of what is actually going to happen than Canada. After all, we had SARS in our country. It left another nation and came into our country. Because of that, we saw a human toll and an economic disaster. It was when the World Health Organization recognized that we were also actually guilty that we realized Canadians could have potentially transported this virus to the United States, Australia and perhaps other countries in Europe, so the World Health Organization had no option but to put out a travel advisory.
What was our responsibility in the House at that time? Our responsibility was where our jurisdictions lay. First of all, importing and exporting and individuals arriving in Canada or leaving Canada fall under federal jurisdiction. At the time of the SARS outbreak, I had the privilege of being the senior health critic for my party. I have always seen health care as a non-partisan issue. We should approach it in a non-partisan way. We can go and play politics with other issues, but when it comes to health care, we should not. We cannot afford the time. We cannot afford the economic costs. We certainly cannot afford the political fallout from it.
In that case, I wanted the then minister of health to understand the importance of SARS and to take an aggressive approach in dealing with it. Before question period, I told the minister what actual question I was going to ask her in the House. I wanted her to reply in a way that would throw some light on the situation and push her toward a leadership position. I have never done that since, and it was the first time I did. I did it because SARS breached all political party lines. I was disappointed with the results I got when I saw what the provinces were doing.
The member for Parry Sound--Muskoka, now the Minister of Health, was the Ontario minister of health when the SARS outbreak occurred. He took the lead on SARS. When the travel advisory was put out for the city of Toronto, he actually went to Geneva to fight it, to say that the travel advisory should not have been put on Toronto, and actually, the travel advisory was placed on Toronto after SARS had been contained and controlled in the Toronto area.
As it was not the federal minister of health who acted in an aggressive way, in a quarterback way, we saw the disconnect between the federal responsibility role and the provincial responsibility role. Therein lies the reason that we absolutely need to get the lines of communication straight. We need to do everything we possibly can to ensure the Public Health Agency and the Chief Public Health Officer have clear directions and guidelines set out as to what should happen and who should be in charge if this were ever to take place again. We know that it probably will. It is just a matter of time.
I mentioned earlier the avian flu. We had some experience with what we thought might be the avian flu in the lower B.C. mainland, in the Fraser Valley area where we had to eliminate a number of poultry because of it.
There is good news and bad news on the avian flu side of it. The bad news is that in 2005 we had 95 cases worldwide and 41 deaths. However, since January 2006, and we are only a third of the way into the year, we have had 61 cases and 37 deaths worldwide. We have seen the avian flu actually spread into Europe, into Africa and into Asia Minor. Most of the world has experienced some of what is potential in this virus. The experts are telling us that we are very close to receiving it here in North America. We know it is spreading.
What we do not know is whether the virus will mutate into a pandemic. The experts are divided on that. It has been around for a couple of years. Some of them say that a virus never sits stagnate. It is always mutating and when it is mutating it could easily trigger to mutate between human to human contact. If that were to happen we would be sitting in a potential pandemic situation. That potential is always there and it is escalating as times goes on.
Another group of scientists are saying that the longer this virus is out there and it has not mutated the less chance it actually will mutate.
I am not trying to raise alarms, other than to say that there are things we know and there are things we do not know. The thing we know is that it is spreading. The thing we do not know is whether it will be the next pandemic. However we had better be prepared in either case. Therein lies why it is so important for the bill to pass. We can debate it in the House and try to fine tune it as much as we possibly can so that we are prepared for whatever might happen.
A perfect example of this happened in the health committee last year. Some of my colleagues who sat on that same committee are here in the House. It was when the avian flu and the pandemic began that the Tamiflu was said to be the anti-viral that could help prevent and actually cure individuals with avian flu and we had a glut internationally of wanting to acquire the Tamiflu. The pharmaceutical officials came to the committee and we talked about Tamiflu and whether we were prepared. The Chief Public Health Officer was there and we were able to discern whether or not we were doing the appropriate thing. At least we had some experts who we could go to be able to discern as parliamentarians whether we were as prepared as we could be for what might or might not be transpiring.
As it has turned out, we have some Tamiflu in Canada. Whether we have enough or not we could still debate, but whether it is actually a product that can do the job if the virus mutates is another question. We know that if the virus mutates, the Tamiflu may not work at all.
Nonetheless, we have a professional, the Chief Public Health Office, in case something like this happens. The number one advantage of having a medical officer who is an expert is that he is not a politician. The last thing we want in a crisis situation is anyone who has a political bent. In saying that, we must understand that the responsibility of the federal minister of health is to be able to deal with the situation and deal with the agency.
It is important to have someone who is a professional in the health field because it puts the public's mind at rest knowing that a professional, whose area of expertise is medicine and not politics, is dealing with a potential pandemic. It gives me comfort knowing we have Dr. David Butler-Jones who has his mandate to follow this internationally and nationally, is able to educate our doctors and front line nurses, and is able to make teams of individuals prepared and ready to deal with a pandemic if and when such an event were to happen.
The agency would do more than just prepare us for any kind of a potential pandemic. It also would be looking at chronic diseases of all kinds. We now realize that chronic disease is the number one cause of death and disability in Canada. We need to do whatever we can to prevent and stop the progress of these chronic diseases. This leads us into the physical environment in which individuals are involved. We know that 60% of the determinants of the health of the population relate to physical environment as well as the social and economic environment. These are areas that we should not overlook and the agency will have the mandate to deal with them.
We could get into the specifics of the agency and talk about whether it should be inside or outside Health Canada but what we need to have is an agency that is focussed on its mandate. We do not want to take a shotgun approach or water it down in any way, shape or form. It is a wise way for the legislation to go forward, which is for the agency to be outside of Health Canada, that it deal with its mandate and, specifically, that it be able to communicate with the population in case of a very serious situation. I am very much in favour with the way this has been drafted. It is the right way to go.
It is important that the agency report directly to the minister. I look forward to annual reports coming back to the Department of Health because it is important for this body and the politicians who are here to have public responsibility and public reporting of what that agency is actually doing and whether we are preparing the country for what may or may not be happening.
The legislation is long overdue. SARS hit in 2003, a long time ago, and, thank goodness, it was not the pandemic and that we have not had one since. We have had some time but there is a striking difference between the past government and what we are seeing in how we actually bring this forward because it is all about leadership.
Later today we will be introducing our first budget but this legislation that is now on the floor will be driven through very quickly. I am looking forward to committee where we will be able to flesh this out to see if there are any problems with it in any other way and then to move it on and enact it as soon as possible, giving our confidence to Dr. Butler-Jones, our Chief Public Health officer, because this is very important for us to do. It is important for us to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we and all Canadians are prepared and this legislation would do all of that and more. This is the beginning of an exciting chapter in the history of Canada and it prepares us well for the 21st century and beyond.