Mr. Speaker, the member can ask me a question afterward if he wants to have me say something other than what I am saying. I would be happy to answer that further.
There will be an attempt to get the travel advisory lifted. It was over the top and an overreaction by the World Health Organization. Some evidence of that is the fact that officials from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta went to Toronto to study the situation and quite appropriately said it was not a matter of avoiding the city. They indicated there was no reason to avoid the city. If people were going to avoid being in contact with SARS they should avoid those health care institutions where there have been patients with SARS. That was a reasonable approach.
Nevertheless the World Health Organization is concerned about the spread of it in other parts of the world. I can appreciate that if this disease got into developing countries that do not have the health care system that we have in Canada it could be catastrophic.
Hopefully the team that is going over there will be able to persuade the WHO that the travel advisory needs to be lifted. When that is done, and with the cooperation of the three levels of government, people in the international community will be told that the advisory has been lifted and that Toronto is a safe place to visit. This should restore some of the large revenues lost by the tourism and hospitality industries in Toronto.
Tomorrow the greater Toronto area caucus will meet again on this issue. It will look at several recommendations that came from the summit today from the Chinese business associations and from the unions representing those in the hospitality industry in Toronto and will make further recommendations to the government. Ministers will be attending the session tomorrow. This will give us an opportunity for a fulsome discussion.
The bottom line is that the governments at all three levels are pulling together to resolve this issue. There has been some question about leadership. I think the media has distorted and exaggerated that issue considerably. There is always room for improvement in leadership, but in this particular case people have done what was necessary for them to do.
In the early stages of this it was necessary to hear from the medical profession. They were the ones giving the daily advisories on this matter and appropriately so since it was a medical concern. Now we all need to be engaged in terms of a recovery plan. We have to get the Toronto economy and the Ontario and national economies which are all affected by this, moving again. We have to get people to come to our country, our province and our city.