Mr. Chair, with respect to the two countries, I think this is not an unusual scenario. In many places, when you have an epidemic, you have an epicentre, and then other spots where it's not as severe in terms of the number of cases. Why the difference? I wish I could answer this question, Mr. Chair, for the committee.
I think most of the time, it's a multifactorial environment, and at this stage, I think we're going to need to take a step back to figure it out. What we've seen is that in some places—especially in the long-term care facilities, which became a centre of amplification—having a health care worker working in more than one place adds to the contamination and community transmission, so there is at least some of that.
Then there is this thing about the timing and the influx of people who came in straight from the beginning. These are all assumptions. When people came back from the break week, there was no big follow-through on people who were coming in. I know that; I came back mid-March, and nobody asked my name. I just walked in, they gave me a pamphlet, and I went home. It was up to me to do my quarantine.
This is going to need much more investigation than me just saying my opinion, but I think it's going to be multifactorial, and it's the addition of all those little things that makes it a recipe for disaster, plus the density of the population in Toronto and Montreal.