Thank you. It's another good question.
Our Canadian pandemic plan has two primary goals. One is to reduce mortality and morbidity, particularly in the most vulnerable, and the other is to, if you like, maintain the infrastructures that go to creating a civic society and the critical infrastructure pieces. The two are linked in that if we keep people as healthy as possible and minimize the rates of infection and illness and absenteeism, we have a larger workforce in place to manage the health care system, or to maintain bridges, ferries, transportation, municipal infrastructure services, fire, police, ambulance, etc. So part of our focus is on keeping those front-line workers healthy by focusing on, in this case, early intervention through access to antiviral drugs, particularly for people who have become ill or are at particular risk for serious illness.
The other piece of the pandemic planning goes back a number of years and has to happen, as I think you pointed out, at the provincial or the territorial or the local level, where local regional health authorities or local public health agencies have to engage with their municipal counterparts. Certainly in B.C., and I believe across the rest of the country, the fundamental primary responsibility for disaster and emergency response lies with municipalities. They are the foundational piece of that.
We and, I think, most provinces have put up annexes of their pandemic plans, which do include guidelines for municipalities and in fact businesses in general, on how to prepare for predictable things like pandemics in terms of looking at mission critical structures and ensuring that you have plans in place for a reduced workforce through increased absenteeism, that your critical infrastructure pieces are duplicative so that at least you have somebody who knows where the critical switch is that manages the water treatment plant or electricity or power grid. That has to be done at the local level, and it really has to be done in intense cooperation with the local public health folk who can know the details.
I think that prior to the arrival of H1N1, across the country we lapsed a bit into pandemic planning fatigue. There was so much going on that it was hard to maintain the focus on that; it should have been kept up year after year after year. I think it has taken H1N1 to give us a wake-up call, particularly for some people, perhaps, to realize that they didn't keep their planning up to date, that they weren't up to date with their websites or that we didn't develop the linkages that we need to develop at that very local level.