Yes, absolutely.
First of all, you will start to hear more about pandemics because the avian influenza will start up again in the next few weeks. It is starting again; we're starting to see a few deaths. So we predict we will start to have more discussion on them.
I've done a lot of speaking in the United States post-SARS about what we learned and how we did things. One of the points I always make to the U.S. is that one of the challenges they'll face, but which made our job easier in Canada when we had the initial provincial emergency—because we were able to issue directives to the hospitals on what to do, and got compliance with those directives and were able to stop the spread of the SARS virus within the hospital system—is that in a more fragmented system, with a mix of mostly private and some public hospitals, it is much more difficult to do that.
Going back to an earlier point, it really means that the way to do that—and what I say to the Americans—is that you must have these discussions now and you must agree that you're all going to do the same thing before the emergency, so you're not trying to bring everybody on board during the emergency, because if you haven't got control over the system then you have to build it through consensus and teamwork.
We recognize this in Canada, and the preparation and consistency in the pandemic plan federally, provincially and municipally is very good in Canada. Now we're taking it outside of health care and looking at all of the other areas of government.
So it's a lesson for both countries, but we do have an advantage because we come to the table with an attitude of working together.