Madam Speaker, since April, I have been working with the provinces and territories in the rollout of the pandemic plan.
I was a territorial health minister for five years and know full well, intimately, the plan that was developed back in 2006 and agreed to by provinces and territories. There were lots of lessons learned at that time, and during the SARS outbreak, to develop a plan for Canada. When it was time to implement the plan, provinces and territories became aware of the presence of H1N1, over a weekend, from the confirmed lab results in Mexico.
In terms of why August was the date chosen, the chief public health officers and medical officers across the country through their ministries advised us at the time that it was very important for us in Canada to complete the production of the regular flu vaccine.
We know full well that in Canada about 4,000 Canadians die of the regular flu. The medical experts recommended that it was important to complete the vaccine against that. So that was completed over the summer months. As soon as that was done, the production of the H1N1 vaccine started, again based on the medical advice of the provinces and territories.
Something else that was developed, which my good friend from the NDP took part in, was a gathering in Winnipeg of a group of medical experts and chief medical officers to look at the cases we were seeing in Canada, the more serious cases, and what some of the underlying conditions were. They brought together a number of experts across the country and international community to develop the sequencing guidelines.
We recognized at the time that we could not immunize 33 million Canadians at one time, and it was important to target the most vulnerable. That guideline was established for the provinces and territories to use in the rollout of the first six million doses of vaccine distributed to the provinces.
I will continue to work with the provinces to roll out the vaccine to them as soon as it comes through from GSK.