As the parliamentary secretary has indicated, removing risk group 2 removes the whole essence and public health intent of the bill. As the agency and David Butler-Jones have stated, we believe in the importance of a national biosafety standard to ensure the safety of all Canadians. I'm an infectious disease specialist who also deals with laboratories, and some of these risk group 2 pathogens are clearly pathogenic, causing illnesses and sometimes death in humans, and they should be handled safely. I don't think there's any dispute about that, and I think we all agree that risk group 2 should be handled differently, but in a safe manner. I certainly do not believe that's necessarily happening now. We do have reports of specific laboratory-acquired infections, but there is no national reporting mechanism to actually capture these.
In public health, one of the key cornerstones is prevention, and while we haven't heard of an escape from a level 3 lab, or indeed a level 2 lab, we don't want to be waiting for an actual incident to happen before laying down what we believe are reasonable and feasible national standards to ensure it doesn't happen. By removing risk group 2, as the parliamentary secretary has said, you have removed our ability to know who has what pathogens, that is, the majority of pathogens in Canada. You have removed our ability to assess whether they have handled those pathogens in an appropriate manner, and whether the labs who think they're risk group 2 labs are indeed not handling certain pathogens they should not be handling under those conditions. We would not be able to have the information necessary to even measure laboratory-acquired infections, or their impacts. So by removing risk group 2, you would be removing a very large aspect of what we already currently do on the human pathogens importation regulations, where risk groups 2, 3, and 4 pathogens and their laboratories are already under the permits regime and under the required laboratory biosafety guidelines.
So we truly believe that by removing this we would not then have a national standard we could apply to all laboratories.