Well, at this point the committee is reviewing it. Under our original intent, the legislation itself was high-level, but often legislation is. At the point where the rubber hits the road, many of the concerns will be difficult to address in legislation, because it's a bit of a blunt instrument. For example, is it all level two pathogens that we are concerned about? No. Is it even all level three pathogens that we're concerned about? No. But it will require an extensive consultation with those who are experts in all of these fields to know which ones we're worried about and which we aren't. Questions about whether something is E. coli 157 or the E. coli that everybody has in their gut, et cetera, will require extensive consultation to make sure we have the right ones in the right categories from a regulatory standpoint.
It's the same with the issue of security clearance. We have no desire for or interest in security clearance for level two alone. That is an unnecessary burden and will not assist us. The whole intent of it, through the regulatory process and the program framework, is to have the least intrusive, most effective regime, with the fewest side effects—just as we have therapeutically. That will require a lot more detailed conversation and consultation than we can get by means of the development of the act itself. But the act will set the framework from which we can move. It will take us some time to get to the regulatory...but that's what I mean by our intent: to continue through with it.
We all want this to be right; we all want it to be a minimum burden; we all want to be effective. We have already had situations.... For example, some members of the committee will remember when we identified H2N2, being distributed all around the world.
H2N2 was the last pandemic virus, from the 1960s. No one born since then has any immunity. It was sent as a lab proficiency test labelled as pathogen level two to 8,000 labs, including doctors' offices, around the world. That could have been the next pandemic. It's only because we had the regulatory framework in place for imported pathogens that we were able not only to identify where it came from, but also to deal with all the facilities in Canada that had imported it, so that very quickly they could destroy it. That's just one instance.