Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think from what I'm hearing on both sides of the table, I have to say I'm not ready to go to clause-by-clause.
Mr. Fletcher said that we have to lean on our officials, and I really believe that. But these are the same officials who brought us Bill C-12 and implied they could do it, and now we're hearing that they don't know how to do it or they don't have enough money to do what they brought to us themselves in Bill C-12.
So Mr. Fletcher was right: These are changes that meet the needs of the officials who don't seem to know how to do this or who maybe don't have enough money for more quarantine officers. If you're going to check people at a border and have a quarantine official, you can't have somebody driving from the Toronto airport to Windsor to look over people on a bus. Yet that's what they're telling us. There are only 30 locations. That means all the major international airports and the two main ports in the country. Is that good enough? I would question that.
We heard at the time from the CMA, the Canadian Medical Association, and now this thing has been in place for a while, at least at airports and ports, and I'd like to know what they have to say about the Quarantine Act and what they think about the safety.
The other thing, before I could possibly decide, Mr. Chair, is I need to know how many of those 266,000 people who enter our country come by land. What if it's more than half? I agree with Dr. Bennett: why would we give this up? This is not a technical amendment. It is a change in policy, and it therefore has to be dealt with much more seriously than would a technical amendment.
So, no, I'm not ready, and if you want, I'll make some suggestions for witnesses.