That is a very good and quite a big question. Implementing animal health policies is my colleague Colleen's responsibility, but I'll speak to it and she can add.
In deciding policies, we look at whether the disease is present in Canada. If it is present, we look at whose role it is, because there's a shared responsibility between provinces and the federal government. We'll take care of all responsibilities for diseases that are not present in Canada. In other words, we'll look at the border and any diseases that come in, we'll manage or eradicate them.
Second, we also look to work with the Public Health Agency of Canada to understand the implications of the zone audit perspective for human public health issues and how we manage them. We can manage that with the Public Health Agency and also with the provinces.
We always look at those areas when we develop our programs. For diseases that are not present, our first action is to keep them out, or if they come in, to eradicate them. With ASF, because it's not here, our actions have been based on prevention. We took a novel approach to keep it out. Given the global concentration of this virus that is circulating in the world, our industry thinks we need to take action on prevention.
As for the international role, we have actually worked with OIE and other partners such as the FAO and the European Commission. They are now living with this disease, so we wanted to learn from them. We held a forum here in Ottawa to learn from their best practices in case we got this disease here and had to take action. We learned a lot and we have come up with a pretty good approach moving forward, which is synthesized in this.
At the same time, Canada took a leadership role in this by bringing the world together, because it's a global problem and we want to tackle this collectively to minimize the concentration of this virus. Our objective is also to keep it out of the Americas region.