Mr. Chair, first let me say in relation to a comment the hon. member made that I know what my job is and my job is not useless photo ops. My job is letting front line responders do what they know how to do and my job is making sure my department is working with the Ministry of Health in Ontario and front line public health responders to make sure we have all the resources on the ground integrated in a way that controls and contains, in this case SARS, to protect the public health of Torontonians and Canadians. Forget the photo ops, boys, this is too serious. What we do is make sure that we are fulfilling our obligations as a federal department of health as it relates to the public health of Canadians.
The other thing I would say is that I find it very interesting that in spite of Dana Hanson's column, and I have the greatest respect for Dana Hanson, centres like the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta have nothing but praise for the work that Canada did, for the way the three levels of government worked together. In fact it indicated that it wants to work with us in relation to our national strategy and thinks that it would be very useful to participate with us and have a North American strategy.
Again, Dr. David Heymann, who heads up the communicable diseases division of WHO, although I do not have his quote directly in front of me, said something to the effect of how Canada did everything right.
That does not mean that it was not a public health challenge. Of course it was. That does not mean that there are not lessons to be learned, because of course there are, which is why I asked Dr. David Naylor to put in place a lessons learned exercise.
The hon. member raises an important question about what we do learn for the future, because we know there will be new public health challenges whether it is West Nile or some re-emerging infection or disease or some new disease such as SARS, which eight weeks ago we knew nothing about. But today, because of the state of our public health infrastructure, scientific and otherwise, and those of some other countries, we know an awful lot, we know about control and containment, we know what works and we can share that with the rest of the world. Dr. Naylor will help us build for the future, which is what is important.
And yes, I think there is not a country in the world that would not say we learn from every one of these public health challenges and it is our obligation to learn and build for the future, just as we learned after September 11, a bioterrorim challenge. It spoke to our public health infrastructure. I am sorry: September 11 was a terrorist situation, not a bioterroism situation. We learn from that. We see what works, what we need to integrate, where the omissions are. That is why we spent $102 million since September 11 doing just that: to enhance our capacity to deal with a range of public health measures, not just bioterrorism. As I indicated earlier, a lot of the things we have done, and that $102 million, help us deal with things like SARS and will help us deal with West Nile.
One of the most important things we have done is that we have upgraded our labs. We have put more advanced equipment in our labs so that we are able to deal with things like the epidemiology of SARS. We are able to deal with things like the confirmatory test that is done in relation to West Nile virus. We are able to share those results with the rest of the world. We are able to work on a diagnostic test and we are able to work on vaccines in partnership with researchers in Canada's great universities like UBC and elsewhere.
I would say that I have great respect for Dr. Hanson's point of view. I take his message as being that one learns from every public health challenge. We learn where the gaps are, where we can integrate and where we need new resources. It is our obligation to learn those lessons and build for the future and that is what we will do.