Waterloo region is particularly well suited to it. It has a long history of taking immigrants and that goes back to the 19th century when people came into our region. We can go back to the Russian Mennonites who came in the 1920s, and the Vietnamese community. We took large numbers at that particular time, and there's a sense of stewardship that exists in the community, perhaps because the Mennonite roots are there. It's always risen to the occasion and done those sorts of things.
I think one of the strengths we've brought to it is a collaborative approach to doing things. As soon as this thing started to happen and emerge, we thought that we couldn't have people running all over the place doing their own thing. Somehow we had to bring this together.
As was referenced earlier, we invoked our emergency planning model on a regional basis for all the agencies. It was developed during the SARS outbreak, but we took that model—Mike is here, and he can maybe speak to it better—and adapted that to what was going on here. All the key agencies were brought in, a table was created, regular meetings were held with the medical officer of health, and the Reception House co-chaired that group and started to pull everybody together to make sure we were all going in the same direction. We identified common needs, people had their roles to do, and people weren't stepping all over one another.
I think that's the key to success in pulling it all together. If you are all running off in different directions you get a lot of unintended consequences. It's not that everything is perfect, but I think it certainly is much more coordinated, much more welcoming, and much more successful.