Actually, because we're so short of time, I'm going to put two questions to you and a comment. If you have time to deal with them now, please do, but if not, could you get back to the committee on them?
First, I want to thank you for staying beyond the regular hours at our committee. Unfortunately, the votes cut us short.
I want to come back to the question of surge capacity. You're a former minister of health in Ontario during the SARS time. You said then that you personally felt we had to build in more surge capacity. All the hospital administrators across the country are telling us this is a huge problem in the case of a pandemic, especially when you get yourselves in a situation where your front-line workers are at risk and are the first affected. So we need that surge capacity.
I recognize it's provincial administration, but I believe there's a federal role, and the following is a suggestion I would like you to consider. In federal-provincial relations in all departments across the board, I think if we look at what we do in social housing, if we look at the role that CMHC could play—a role that it has played in the past, and I think it could play again—in helping to build nursing home facilities, and those types of things, we could at least optimize front-line hospitals and not have that broken capacity, which I think would help in emergency medicine and with surge capacity in having that potential.
I'd like to bring up another point that I have discussed with you in the House in the past. The bills that you're bringing forward now—and I know we'll be discussing them fully—give authority where there was not authority before. There's always a danger that it becomes a responsibility that must be used at all times.
Right now, your department advises Canadians of the health risks of certain foods and of certain behaviours, and that's fine and necessary, but sometimes it crosses the line. We had one example this week with lobster tomali, on which you gave Canadians an advisory that there was a risk. It's an advisory from the Department of Health, which has a great reputation and which Canadians trust. But when you read the third paragraph of the advisory, it says that if you eat the tomali of more than two lobsters a day, there may be some risk of parasitic shellfish poisoning—if that happens to be in that population of lobsters. It's a very, very remote risk, but you may be putting a billion-dollar industry at risk in coastal Atlantic Canada.
So my question to you is, what process do you follow? Do you talk to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and all of those people, and the provinces, before putting out advisories?
If you have time, there's one more question you could answer, on the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. The act has been in place for a number of years now. A couple of years ago we had the first set of regulations on signing, or consent. Where are all the others? Where are the seven other sets of regulations? Why haven't they been coming forward? When can we expect them?