Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee.
I thank you for the opportunity to appear on the matter of amending section 34 through Bill C-42. I am the provincial health officer, so I'm the chief medical officer of health for the province of British Columbia. I'm here on behalf of not only myself but the three chief medical officers of health of the public health system for the health regions in British Columbia that have contiguous border crossings with the United States. They are Dr. John Blatherwick of Vancouver, Dr. Paul Hasselback of the Interior Health Authority, and Dr. Roland Guasparini of Fraser.
We want to speak on the matter of amending Bill C-42. I've read the transcripts from your last meeting and I understand the desire to increase security and provide security to Canadians from threats of communicable diseases being imported across the border. But I do not believe that a requirement to mandate an advance notice for land conveyances will actually add any modicum of additional security to the system we have. It will perhaps give the appearance of increased diligence, but it has the potential to divert public health resources away from other tasks they would be doing.
What I think is needed to enhance the general security for public health for importing public diseases is a better and increased public health surge capacity within provinces and territories, and the completion of the build of electronic health records and the communicable disease surveillance system that is currently being developed. I say this because, in all honesty, looking at SARS and our experience with imported diseases, we're most likely to recognize or need to recognize imported illnesses or new illnesses in emergency rooms or hospitals. The chance of picking something up at the border is infinitesimally small.
So our effective public health response is going to require rapid recognition and diagnosis, and then response and referral to an active public health system that can do the necessary contact tracing for persons who have been exposed, so they can be isolated or cases can be quarantined. Despite intensive surveillance for SARS during the period we had SARS, no SARS cases were effectively detected via airport or port surveillance.
I think the historical rationale for quarantine on ships worked because the trip travel time was much longer than the incubation period of any of the diseases we were concerned about. I think this is more dubious for air transport travel time because it is often shorter than most of the incubation periods of the diseases we are concerned about. The chances of somebody actually developing an illness and being clinically diagnosable while on an airplane is relatively small. That is why we pick people up before they get on the plane and stop them from getting on, or pick them up several days after they've landed when they've presented at hospitals.
I worry about the requirement for adverse notification of people who might be symptomatic, particularly in wintertime. I'm concerned that reports of influenza-like illnesses, bronchitis, coughs, fevers, etc., would put so much noise into the system that we'd divert resources away to look for this and wouldn't pick up any of the signals of real illness.
That's essentially a summary of the position or advice I might give or ask this committee to consider. I believe you may have received a couple of letters to that same effect from my colleagues who are medical officers of health.