Our recommendation was focused on enhanced preparation, which does not necessarily mean hiring 3,000 people, as you suggested, just waiting for a mandatory quarantine to be ordered so that they can monitor it.
It really means having a plan in order to be ready in case it becomes necessary to increase capacity. In our audit, we found that the Canada Public Health Agency had not done this kind of planning and was not ready to administer a national quarantine. It realized that it did not have the required resources and therefore asked for assistance from other agencies to monitor travellers by phone and other methods. In only 40% of cases, when it had established that certain high-risk people were not complying with the requirements, did it call upon law enforcement agencies.
That's why it's important to be better prepared and to have a plan in place so that capacity can be increased if required.
However, in English it would be “to deal with surge capacity”.
In other words, it's important to be able to react when there is a rapid and significant increase in needs, followed eventually by a decrease. It means being better prepared and doing a better job of planning.