Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I want to thank all the members today for joining us. I also especially want to add my congratulations to the Office of the Auditor General for ensuring that the workers who were on strike previously are now back in the office. Hopefully we can begin a good process of ensuring that they can continue to have a good, safe and dignified workplace. Thank you very much for that hard work.
Regarding this audit, I think what we're seeing here is something very clear and very blatant, which is that we don't have a nationwide quarantine system at our borders. That seems to be a very obvious fact. As an Albertan, I am particularly troubled by the situation in Montreal that was mentioned by my colleague from Quebec, with the mayor having to send support to the airport in order to see some confidence in public health. That's simply unacceptable.
I want to draw some comparisons with my home province, where this didn't happen. We didn't have a city authority who had the ability to do that. I want to draw particular attention to the fact that Calgary was also one of the four cities—along with Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal—accepting international flights during this period, yet there's no record of any hotel quarantine violations in Alberta. Most Albertans know there were violations. People were upset about these violations. Members of the airport and the city themselves tried to address these concerns.
I understand from reading this report that there was some requirement for co-operation by provincial authorities in order to make sure there was a particular level of enforcement. Provincial leadership in Alberta, and also in Saskatchewan in this case, had either refused or did not want to really tackle this issue by adopting the regulatory procedures or the authorities required to enforce some of this, such as the ticketing system, for example.
Despite having had years of the global pandemic, despite understanding that we didn't have this co-operative system, we're at the point where we've had this kind of hodgepodge of jurisdictions when we really need a nationwide one. There's really a large concern. My concern is with PHAC's ability to work with provincial governments to sign on to things like the Contraventions Act, so offences under the Quarantine Act can be dealt with in other provinces through this simple process of issuing tickets. It is my understanding that Alberta and Saskatchewan have refused to sign this—or maybe some clarity can be provided here—to severely limit the ability of police to enforce quarantine measures and issue fines for infractions.
The audit clearly shows that the results of this gap were...in B.C., for example, a jurisdiction just west of Alberta, over $3 million in fines were issued for quarantine infractions, so we know they were happening. In Ontario, there was almost $18 million in fines, but in Alberta, despite the fact that it was home to one of the country's four airports that accepted international flights, the authorities issued $0 in fines. This shows a massive gap in our ability to enforce public health measures, and it leaves Albertans in particular more vulnerable to new variants when we can't understand or enforce these things.
Could the Auditor General perhaps comment on the follow-up on some of this work? Also, could Dr. Kochhar comment in relation to what the ministry plans to do about this huge, obvious inequity?