Thank you very much for having me here today.
I did not prepare extensive briefing notes as my colleague did, but I would like to tell a little bit of my story.
I was hired by the University of Calgary over 23 years ago. I became a biological safety officer shortly thereafter. When I started working for the University of Calgary, the issue of biological safety was non-existent. We had researchers working throughout the university with materials. The university, which was somewhat responsible for what was happening in its facilities, did not know who was working with those materials, where they were working with them, or what those people were working with. In other words, the university was in no position in any way to know what was going on or in any way to try to contain it.
Over the past 23 years I have been successful in introducing a system that allows the university to know what is being worked with, where it is being worked with, and so forth. Initially the response from researchers was that because they were microbiologists, they knew what they were doing, and therefore there was no need for regulation and no need for any guidance whatsoever. I found in the meantime that this was more bravado than actual knowledge of how to work with biohazardous materials.
It reminded me, in retrospect, of the introduction of nuclear substances into research programs. In these situations researchers were using nuclear substances as tools to achieve certain outcomes without having any background on the work. That is even more the case nowadays; a lot of biohazardous materials are used as tools to establish certain outcomes without any knowledge or background on the part of the researchers on the potential hazards of those materials.
When the importation legislation referring to laboratory biosafety guidelines came in some time ago, for the first time we had an inkling of what such regulated work with biological materials would look like. Many of our laboratories are level 2 laboratories. One problem researchers had was to understand that containment level 2 laboratories do not need as much in terms of requirements as they would originally say they would need. There was a preconception that any work they did with level 2 materials required expensive equipment, which is simply not true.
The situation that has existed from the time we had the importation legislation up until now is similar to requiring only the drivers of vehicles that are imported into Canada to have insurance, to have a licence plate, and to follow the rules of the road, while no one else has to meet those requirements at all.
My university is in full support of this legislation. We'd like to get a clear picture of what it looks like. Let me assure you that in times of financial restraint of the kind we are going through right now, it is the issues that are legislated that receive the attention of people at universities and other institutions. There's a good case to be made that anything that works with nuclear substances is going to be addressed and anything that is regulated is going to be addressed, but biological safety is not being legislated to that degree and would not be addressed to that extent.
Thank you very much.