Mr. Chair, everyone in this place disagrees with the minister, including people outside of this place, such as the Auditor General. If we go through the Auditor General's report of September 2002, we see that she steps through this in chapter 2, line and verse, where the federal government is completely lacking in resources and the ability to respond to a crisis. If we look at that report from September 2002, we see that it is almost as if the Auditor General could see an issue like SARS coming down the road and was suggesting that the government was not capable of dealing with it.
The jury has already come in on this one. As a result of how the government handled this, last month for the first time in how many years we had 19,000 job losses in this country. Last Friday when I put the question to the Minister of Finance, it was answered by the Minister of Industry who admitted that yes, SARS did take a toll on the Canadian economy and that in fact we lost jobs. He admitted that we lost jobs. We lost 19,000 jobs and are still counting. Many experts are suggesting that because of the way the government handled this there are more job losses to come.
The fact is that we are ill-prepared to deal with the next emergency that may or may not be around the corner and the fact is that the minister's answer is simply not good enough because the record speaks for itself. The government was unprepared, she was caught flat-footed and it cost Canada 19,000 jobs and 24 lives.