Health committee  I think it's important to clarify that we're only talking about advance reporting. Land conveyances that are hitting the border still have to report if someone is sick. I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. It's not that we're abandoning reporting of illnesses in lan

Health committee  I'll start. Other federal departments--the Department of Justice, Transport Canada, Canada Border Services Agency, the Canadian Coast Guard--were consulted about these changes. So those consultations have been done on this amendment. Maybe I'll turn this over to Howard.

Health committee  The difference is the advanced reporting function. As was mentioned, in a plane or a ship, there is no chance to disembark. For a bus coming across the border, if someone is obviously ill and is coughing, the screening officer, the customs official, would contact the medical offi

Health committee  There is provision, as you mentioned, for the minister, under the prescribed conveyances clause here, to actually implement this if he thought it was appropriate. If conditions change, the minister can make regulations and can issue orders under this clause to change and actually

Health committee  When the bus arrived at the border, if there was someone ill, they would still have to report that there was someone ill to the customs officials, who could then, if they thought this was something that looked suspicious, call our quarantine officer in Vancouver, who would then t

Health committee  There are a number of different scenarios here. If someone arrived in Vancouver--came across the border and didn't have any symptoms at the border--and became ill in Vancouver, the local attending physician would contact the local public health officials there, and they would dea

Health committee  Yes, I think what was happening at the same time as this was going through was that there were revisions being made to the International Health Regulations. So that was going on at the same time, and that's what caused a rethinking of some of the wording of this. I don't know i

Health committee  The other thing to keep in mind is our compliance with the International Health Regulations. Globally, there has been a tremendous amount of effort to try to have a common view and a common approach to these things, not just to facilitate the movement of people, but also to facil

Health committee  If someone flew into the United States from another country, they would go through a similar kind of reporting mechanism that we are talking about here. If by chance that person wasn't ill when they flew into the United States but they developed symptoms after they arrived in the

Health committee  In the case of a flu, if you are in a situation in which you have a very deadly flu virus being transmitted, that's obviously the intent.

Health committee  Irrespective of how they came into the country, in a case where someone is incubating a disease, I think it could be a number of days, for example, before someone figured out exactly what was wrong with them. This is why the quarantine officer and the medical officers in the hosp

Health committee  The problem is that often in these situations, by the time someone determines what the illness is and the person becomes sick because of incubation periods and what not, it's after the fact. It's not that easy in some cases to do this at the border, because the person may not be

Health committee  It's only one measure. We need to have other measures in our toolkit. We have to make sure that doctors in emergency rooms and other places as well will detect these diseases.

Health committee  I have some information. Between January and February of this year we did 44 health assessments under the Quarantine Act: 19 were done in Toronto, 15 in Vancouver, eight in Calgary, two in Montreal, and one in Halifax. We get approximately 20 of these incidents a month. We're act

Health committee  No, we're not.