Health Committee on April 18th, 2007

[Steven Fletcher, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, MB]

Subsection 34(2). It just reaffirms—

[John Cuningham]

Okay. So here again we have that the conveyance operators, as soon as they have reasonable grounds to suspect--so it's not that high of a threshold--that these factors are in play, have the obligation to report before they arrive at the destination.

[Steven Fletcher, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, MB]

Regardless of the mode of transportation.

[John Cuningham]

No. If I'm looking at the proposed bill, it's caught by proposed subsection 34(1), which says “This section applies to the operator of any of the following conveyances...”. When they refer to a conveyance in subsection 34(2), it's the conveyances that are circumscribed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

That would be the marine or air. Is that what you're saying?

[John Cuningham]

The marine or air or any prescribed conveyance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Any prescribed conveyance. Okay.

Thank you very much, Mr. Fletcher.

Ms. Priddy, the floor is yours.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Thank you.

I was interested in the comment.... Let me find it here. It was in the notes you used, that you're doing this at this time and then you will be.... Yes, here it is: “new wording does allow for the development of regulations in the future to prescribed other conveyances”. Could you help me to know what that means? Does that mean that conveyances would be described more in the future, or does the particular wording allow for the development of regulations? I'm wondering why we wouldn't just do it all now.

[Dr. Robert Clarke]

Well, it opens the door. If there were some new issue or problem that develops in the future with some different kind of conveyance, we would have the ability to specify that.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

But we don't name the conveyances, anyway. How would we know if it was a new conveyance or an old conveyance, unless, as Mr. Fletcher said, we are somewhere into the future and we're driving air cars to work?

[Dr. Robert Clarke]

There could be new technologies, but there also could be a problem that develops within an existing conveyance, which wasn't covered, and you could use this clause to get it done.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

I am mildly curious as to why conveyances were never named. Perhaps it's more complicated than I understand. Maybe you have to name unicycles, bicycles, and tricycles. I'm not sure. I wonder if you can help me a bit here.

[John Cuningham]

I can't answer the question directly, but what I can say, as Madam Brown pointed out, is that originally the new Quarantine Act referred to a broader set of conveyances. It's certainly conceptually easier to talk about marine, air, and ground. There are three large types of conveyances. Even if we're talking about space one day, they would presumably come by air. So we've pretty much covered everything.

It's quite clear, right now, that the ground conveyances have been taken out. If we summarize what we're hearing here today, it's a balance of a number of factors. There is the evaluation of the current risk with respect to the land conveyances, the balance of the burden on the operators, the burden on the program, and the international comparisons. Then any prescribed conveyance allows the government to deal with a problem if the risk—

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

So I'm out on my private yacht, not a commercial watercraft. I think it only says “commercial”. If I'm out on my yacht with eight people and somebody gets really ill, I have no obligation to tell anybody about that because it is not a commercial vehicle.

[John Cuningham]

Unless it's prescribed.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

It wouldn't be, because it's not commercial.

[John Cuningham]

It could be prescribed. The division right now would cover watercraft or aircraft used in the business. That's commercial.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

I don't use it in a business.

[John Cuningham]

It the says it could also cover any prescribed conveyance.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

It “could”. The words “could” and “might” are used a lot in this, and that is causing me a bit of a problem.

The last point I would make is that while we are making this very mandatory because it's around communicable disease—fair enough—we don't necessarily make it mandatory in this country to report other communicable diseases to the federal government. Is there some cognitive dissonance in that?

[Dr. Robert Clarke]

This is dealing, of course, with people crossing borders. On the other issue of mandatory reporting within the country, we are in the midst of negotiations with provincial partners on that. In fact, there was a meeting of ministers in December to talk about reporting and management of these kinds of diseases. There is work ongoing in terms of increasing our ability to have mandatory reporting and reporting from provinces.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

But currently the provinces can basically tell us to go fly a kite in terms of the immunization rates or whether they have an outbreak of a communicable disease.

[Dr. Robert Clarke]

That's not quite true.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

We'd like them to tell us, but—

[Dr. Robert Clarke]

As you know, with the recent formation of the Public Health Agency, we have a chief public health officer now, and we have a public health network. The public health network is working very actively between the federal, provincial, and territorial partners to improve the capacity and ability to share surveillance information.