Thank you. It wasn't until you drew my attention to what you had seen in Europe, the expansion of tick populations and Lyme disease there, that I started looking into what is happening in Europe.
My bill does touch on this; Bill C-442 deals in paragraph 3(b) with guidelines that also touch on prevention. Of course, that is not quite the same thing as.... A portion of prevention could be the studies that you suggest, to understand exactly why it is spreading. The current prevalent theory is that because of changing temperatures caused by the changing climate, the tick population is spreading.
But we're also seeing other evidence. There was a story in the Times Colonist, the newspaper that covers part of my riding, from Victoria, that there was a raptor discovered—a dead hawk—that had a number of ticks around his eyes. When they analyzed those ticks, they found that some were not deer ticks, but they were also carrying the bacteria that carries Lyme disease. This is hypothetical, so please don't take it as evidence, but there certainly is anecdotal evidence that the bacteria is spreading from deer ticks to other kinds of ticks.
So it may be on the move in other ways that scientists have not yet quite understood. We know that it's more prevalent and we know that it is spreading, and not just where it started, around Lyme, Connecticut—that's why it is called Lyme disease—but into other jurisdictions, obviously including Canada, but also Europe.
Of course, that is the challenge for the medical community. When many of our doctors went to medical school, this wasn't something that was presenting itself as a serious cause of illness.