Public Accounts committee  The federal emergency response plan describes the overall approach, but if there is a problem that involves significant disruption of, let's say, the transportation system, obviously we will turn to the Department of Transport and ask them to work on that specific transportation

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. We will be working with each province. You just talked about Ontario, which is different from Quebec or Newfoundland or the Northwest Territories. We will be looking at clarifying the authorities, the governance, the roles and responsibilities of the emergency managem

Public Accounts committee  Cases like that are acted on at the local level, much more so than at the federal. In general, only the largest emergencies are managed by the federal government.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. I would like to come back to the issue of cooperation. As recommended by the Auditor General, the approval of the Federal Emergency Response Plan will significantly contribute to maximizing the support we can obtain. It is a very good recommendation, which we support a

Health committee  My take on this is that all levels of government are working together. We've done a lot of planning. We have in place mechanisms that will allow us, should the situation worsen, to do a decent job. The best advice I can give to Canadians is to listen to what the health authorit

Health committee  The health portfolio is responsible for health. Public Safety is responsible for coordinating—

Health committee  Well, the Minister of Health.

Health committee  The Minister of Health is clearly the person who is in the lead for the health portion of the pandemic response, yes.

Health committee  If we go back to SARS, Health was responsible for everything.

Health committee  In order to answer your question, I don't want to take 10 minutes, but I have to give you a little bit of history. During SARS, one of the problems was that there was only Health trying to do everything. There was a decision at the time to create the Public Health Agency of Canad

Health committee  The question you are asking is hypothetical. I may not see it the same way you do, because you're not defining that phrase, that there may be hard decisions to make. Yes, there are hard decisions to make every day, but the system we have allows us to bring the information forwa

Health committee  We are very well prepared. I think we are exceptionally well prepared. That doesn't mean we should be complacent, but we, meaning the collective group of government employees, have been working at this since 2002, taking our lead from the science of the Public Health Agency and a

Health committee  We have a list of business continuity coordinators.

Health committee  I think that's probably the best tool, giving you who is in each department—

Health committee  Those are the critical services I was talking about in theory, and it has happened. When there was the power outage, departments relocated from one side of the river to the other. They kicked in their business continuity plan. If something happened today in downtown Ottawa and we