Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to thank both MDS Nordion and the president of the nuclear medicine society for coming today, because this is a very important issue. In the words of the society, it in fact had all the makings of a national medical crisis across this country.
Now, I heard from MDS Nordion that they were aware of the problem on November 22 and that they met with Natural Resources Canada on this issue on November 22. You physicians who were going to need this were not aware until November 27, five days later. Then Dr. O'Brien said in his communiqué that he did not actually talk to anybody at all from Health Canada until probably December 5. So there was a lag time of 13 days before there was any way of talking with anybody in Health Canada to say: What is it we need to do? How can we work on this together?
How did you know on November 22 that this was coming down? Had the nuclear medicine society been consulted? This was obviously going to impact on the nuclear medical society and the patients who see nuclear medicine physicians. Had you been aware on November 22, do you believe there were steps you could have taken, as physicians across the country, to deal with this issue in a way in which you could have triaged patients based on need and so on? Do you think you could have dealt with it over a period of maybe about a month? On the steps that were eventually taken--it was crisis management more than anything else, the shutting down of the reactor and the reopening of the reactor--do you believe your patients could have been served for about a month if you had been consulted early? Do you believe the steps that were eventually taken by the government could have been, in fact, mitigated because you would have been able to deal with it?
Those are the questions I really want to ask you. Were there alternative routes that could have been taken to deal with this thing before it became a crisis and before shutting down and starting up had occurred?