Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-12, the emergency management act. I think we can all remember a time not so long ago when life was gentler and perhaps seemed a lot safer. However, 9/11 happened and, in many ways, the world changed.
After 9/11 it is important for us to remember that while the threats are more evident, certainly in the papers and in our lives, we must all live a life of vigilance, not live a life and be paranoid. In response to that, this bill has come up, a bill that builds upon the work that was done by the previous government in a number of areas.
After 9/11 we constructed PSEPC and invested more than $7 billion in developing an integrated network that would involve threat monitoring, assessment and response, not only here at home but abroad. I will divide the threats into two separate sections: those that are natural and those that are man-made.
We have the natural threats but perhaps one of the most evident and frightening threats for most people was SARS. SARS is a virus that percolates through birds in certain parts of the world, especially in the Guangdong area of China. Within that area we have seen historically, over the last 120 years or more, that every 20 or 25 years a pandemic circles the globe killing sometimes tens of millions of people. Indeed, that is the fear we all have.
SARS is a difficult problem to deal with because the virus itself morphs and changes continuously, which is why developing a vaccine is so challenging and why every year a vaccine comes out but it is never the same as the one in the previous year. The reason is that although the virus is a simple one, it is in some ways a bizarrely clever virus because it always changes its coats. It is always morphing and it is a challenge to keep ahead of it.
Our researchers in Canada are some of the best in the world. After the SARS crisis, we developed an integrated threat assessment program looking at hospitals across the country and monitoring the mortality and morbidity, the sickness and death statistics in the country to find out whether there are any disturbing peaks.
What Canadians are proud of and what is a feather in the cap of our country is that we are the best in the world. Because of that, other countries have asked us for our expertise. We have sent over some of our top-notch mobile labs and scientific researchers to the Far East where they are actually on the cusp of where this virus no doubt will stem from and where it will start its deadly march when it is able to transfer from birds to mammals, which of course includes human beings, then, most frighteningly, when that virus is able to be transferred from person to person.
It is a testimony to our scientific researchers and our integrated threat assessment program that we set up that we are the best in that area.
In another area, we saw the tsunami that devastated southeast Asia that also shook us, being a nation that lives in part on the cusp of the Pacific Ocean. My riding is on Vancouver Island and it is something that is very concerning to us. We have begun to set up a tsunami monitoring system in our country and have set up, to some degree, this system in other parts of the world, particularly in the mid-Pacific and further toward the Far East. It has started to work. More work needs to be done and I am sure the government will look at continuing that work so we will have a superb tsunami monitoring system for the Pacific. I know the constituents in my province of British Columbia and other MPs here from my province will be grateful for that.
The other area is SARS. Beyond the threat assessment network, we also developed a system of stockpiling antiviral drugs, particularly Tamiflu, but we need to be careful because this is not the solution to the problem. Tamiflu is not the solution to deal with SARS, for many reasons that I will not get into here.
The other issue I want to talk about gets into the man-made issues, which two of our colleagues from the government's side dealt with. The extent of the challenge is fairly obvious. The response can be divided into two sections. One would be dealing with the individuals who would choose to wage war against others and kill people against their religious beliefs. Indeed, those who utilize religion as a tool to murder others, and I am talking specifically about fundamentalists, and again we have seen a lot of this with Muslim fundamentalists, in no way, shape or form represent the Muslim faith.
In fact, the Quran says very clearly that if a person saves one life, that person has saved the lives of humanity. If a person kills one person, that person kills humanity. Indeed, Islam and the Quran forbid anyone to take up arms against another and to hurt another. That is much misunderstood and is little known.
We have to understand that the people who are utilizing religion and other propaganda to foment often violent sentiments against the west are warping, twisting and mutilating their religion for their own benefit. This can be dealt with in a number of ways.
In the country that spawned this violence we have to do a better job of actually dealing with it pragmatically. Sometimes our combat troops are necessary and they do an outstanding job, as they are doing right now in Afghanistan, giving their lives for security to occur. In order to support them, the development component must occur.
Within the confines of Afghanistan we have simply asked that four parts of this mission be supported. First is the defence component which is being supported, not only from the full combat capability, but also to the development capability. Second is the development component internally in Afghanistan. Third is the training of Afghan security forces. Fourth is dealing with the insurgents from outside Pakistan. Dealing with the insurgency outside Pakistan requires a multi-faceted approach. In the madrassahs of a certain country little children are fed a steady diatribe of hate against the west. As a result, when some of those children grow up, they choose to take up arms against the west.