Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's very nice to see the minister and the Chief Public Health Officer, and Jane Allain as well, here to both share information and answer our questions.
I know that people across the country, who either observed SARS from perhaps some distance or lived in the middle of it and were quite terrified by what was happening, will I think feel some real reassurance about the fact that the act deals with this in this way. So I wanted to acknowledge that.
One of the questions I wanted to ask, because public health is about a variety of communicable diseases--and you could name your disease, I guess--is about the information that gets reported to you. Some of us who were around when the last TB hospital closed and thought we would never see it again are now seeing it in major cities. There is not, as I understand, a mandatory reporting to you, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. So I can have an outbreak in Vancouver of tuberculosis or another communicable disease that is quite significant, and I don't have a legal responsibility to inform you of that. Or do I? Or to pick another one: immunization. We're seeing some very different trends across the country in immunization and a drop-off in immunization rates. How does that information get to you, other than through people's good will and because morally people should report it to you? I understand all of that. But am I correct that there's no mandatory responsibility for me to call and tell you that?