Well, we already talked about the Canada Health Act. That's one possibility, so there are alternatives. However, even if the Emergencies Act is a viable alternative from a legal perspective, I pointed out what are more than political difficulties. These are administrative and financial difficulties, and I think those are greater impediments than are the legal impediments in the Emergencies Act.
The Emergencies Act could do some of these things. It could create a kind of a safety net. It could create a threshold, and the federal government could quite possibly have already acted on that, or it could have used other federal legislation to create that, so clearly the problem lies elsewhere.
The fact that Canada has not invoked the Emergencies Act though, I want to emphasize, is not necessarily a failure of the federal government in this federation. It also reflects the fact that in a decentralized federation, the provinces and the provincial governments bear much more weight.
One of the advantages of this is that they saw their responsibilities immediately and acted on them, whereas in the United States there were many states that were waiting for the U.S. federal government to move and to act. It did not do so, and as the weeks went on, some of these governments, like the State of New York, finally realized they had to act. We wouldn't want that kind of situation in Canada. Given what we have, it's far better that the provinces feel that the weight to act is predominantly on their shoulders.
Many other things need to be done to ensure that we have pan-Canadian actions and, second of all, that we have national standards that could be set by the federal government in a number of different ways. It should have used, for example, the leverage that it had in paying for the vaccines to set some of those national standards through an agreement, and, if that federal-provincial-territorial agreement had failed, then to act unilaterally and set those standards.