Mr. Chair, I can start, and I will invite colleagues to pitch in.
In reality what we have been seeing over time is that as COVID-19 progressed, we also came across one of the bigger threats, which was the COVID-19 variants. Those variants were really of concern because of increased transmissibility.
Also at that time, we were still gathering information about what would happen in our testing, our ability to have medical countermeasures.
The gradual approach was first of all, Mr. Chair, the flights from the U.K. were stopped. This was the first time we heard of a U.K. variant. Over time when we started to look around, there were experiences of other countries like Australia and New Zealand. We were informed of the results from the pilot projects we had been doing at various airports, for example, Alberta, where there were some data that people were coming in with infection.
That was a prompt for us to look at what more we could do to stop the importation of COVID-19 and specifically stop the importation of the COVID variants.
That's the frame we were working off.