Mr. Speaker, the member for St. Paul's was of course the former minister of public health. Does she think that the Public Health Agency perhaps may have dedicated more time to issues of preventative medicine had it not been preoccupied and seized with things like SARS, mad cow and Asian flu?
In other words, epidemics and pandemics seem to take the priorities and energies from the new Public Health Agency and leave very little time or resources to deal with things like banning trans fats, which I approached her with early on. She cooperated in dealing with that public health issue. There were issues like banning pesticides which her colleague from Ottawa used to push aggressively.
It seems to me that as a nation, in dealing with public health, we embraced the idea, but we were knocked off the game plan by unforeseeable things like SARS. Would the member care to comment on the dual role the agency could and should have?