Thank you, Chair.
My questions will be for you, Dr. Wark. I share your concern. You know, there's going to be a lot of time for inquiry, but we have to be getting things right now. Looking to change only in December 2022 is too late. I note that one of the significant variants of concern from India was identified in October of last year, yet Canada.... We're just so reactionary on emerging threats, even in the middle of a pandemic.
However, I digress. I wanted to get to recommendations on what we could do to fix some of these gaps right now and then going forward, so that we can include them in our report. The Auditor General's report talking about the risk to Canada being low and not looking at the forward-looking risk was very damning, as you said. What could we do differently right now?
I'm wondering if there's some sort of.... First of all, there's no centralized way of collecting intelligence. You talked about that. I think we need to remedy that, number one. Second, we need to somehow put that information into a very clear risk assessment system that can be used to assess a wide variety of pathogenic risks—almost like a Defcon-level system—so that it can be clearly communicated to the public. Third, associated with each of those risk levels would be measures that the government would undertake, be it flight bans or travel advisories or quarantine measures or whatnot.
That's roughly what's been in my head, reading the Auditor General's report, and I'm wondering if there's anything we could do right now, if it is reorganizing that way or not, to make sure we're not vulnerable, particularly to variants.