Sure. We did look at the Emergencies Act very early on in COVID to understand how it works and whether or not it could be triggered, so let me give you an overview.
The Emergencies Act, unlike provincial emergency legislation, can only be triggered in relatively rare circumstances. The general emergency powers at the provincial level are much broader and provide many more powers. If the federal government were to trigger the Emergencies Act, there are very prescribed areas in which it can utilize it, and that makes things more tricky. It's not so obvious that the Emergencies Act can be used to respond to some of the problems that we've seen arise in COVID-19, such as a requirement to wear masks, for example. However, there are some particular powers that perhaps would allow contact tracing, for example, in a more generalized way, which would allow, perhaps, requirements for lockdowns. There are therefore very limited means there, Don, to permit the federal government to act, but it's fairly prescribed.
There is a question coming out of this, and I think you put it rightly to an earlier witness: What kind of emergency, if a global pandemic isn't a sufficient emergency, would you need to be able to declare a federal emergency, or is it just, as we've said, sort of a hollow promise? What more would you need than this, given 25,000 Canadians have died and the number is mounting? From a normative perspective, it's odd that Canada is one of the only developed countries in the world not to have declared a national emergency.
I think we have to come back to it. The Emergencies Act was written coming out of World War II and a concern about the internment of Japanese Canadians. It's written in a very prescribed way because of that. It's clearly not fit for the purpose of managing a pandemic or a public health emergency, as we've seen.