Public Safety Canada has the key role in terms of coordination of emergencies. Health is only one type of emergency, and both Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada together respond as a health portfolio to health-related emergencies.
Emergency response in Canada is from the local level up to the provinces and from the provinces to the federal government. Through the Pan-Canadian Public Health Network, one of the expert groups, we have been pulling together a pan-Canadian health emergency management system. To operate that and to interconnect, we've essentially been looking at protocols and at the operationalization of an incident management system.
What we've discovered is that emergency management in each of the provinces and territories has progressed in recent years. All of them have emergency management systems. Our role, actually, is to link with all of them and ensure interoperability and communication among them. The concept of a pan-Canadian health emergency management system is as interoperable, connected 13 jurisdictions connected with the federal level. They all sort of function together. It's a separate system, but connected together.
We have done quite a bit of work in recent years to make that happen. We're testing 24/7 contact points, for example, in the provinces and territories. That is a lot more systematic than what the previous state was, which was that we all knew each other, so we knew how to phone someone else, such as another chief medical officer, while he was skiing in Whistler or something. Now we have a 24/7...[Inaudible--Editor]...contact mechanism.