Madam Speaker, compensation would be on a case by case basis. It would not cover all the problem situations. Compensation may not be appropriate in the case of it being a shared responsibility of a community or whatever. We need to think about compensation but it has to be negotiated based on each individual case. We need flexibility with respect to what situations will be compensated. Who would be compensated would need to be negotiated.
After the SARS outbreak in Toronto it was extraordinarily difficult to figure out whether compensation should be extended to all of the people who were affected. Flexibility was needed in order to say who or when or why.
Obviously we will need some flexibility as new diseases are added. The trouble is that when specialists and experts get involved they have tons of opinions. We would have laughed at the word tularemia this time last year until there was a huge outbreak in hamsters in Winnipeg. That was the first issue the chief public health officer for Canada had to deal with in terms of the export of hamsters infected with tularemia, which could have been a public health threat.
We also had hoped that polio and smallpox would be eradicated. We need the flexibility to add or subtract from the list but it needs to be done in a very comprehensive way over time.