Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary in responding to my remarks made a statement that I find quite surprising. He said that there is less of a risk from land travel. I did not know that bacteria and viruses chose air and water travel over land travel. It would seem to me that the greatest volume of traffic entering our country comes by land.
Perhaps he means there is only one country from which people and cargo come into Canada by land and that is the United States, whereas we receive ships and airplanes from all over the world. Is he trying to imply there is less risk with people and cargo coming from the United States, or is this absence of reporting requirement for land travel simply a suggestion that our best friends and neighbours should not really need to report, whereas people from further afield should? I do not know. I just know it does not make sense to me, because I do not think germs and viruses really care which way they come into the country.
On my reference to the Anti-terrorism Act which I used in my remarks, it has been a long-held belief of mine that it is the government's main job to protect the personal security of Canadian citizens. The Canadians with whom I speak have far more worry and anxiety over two other sources that threaten their security.
One is the impact of some of these extreme weather events, the results of which most of us have watched on television, whether it was hurricane Katrina, the tsunami, or various other things, which I think is what has been the impetus behind our attempts to stop global warming.
The other thing Canadians are very worried about is the arrival in their midst of new diseases for which there are no vaccines or cures and which might spread quickly through the population. We have put a name to that, a pandemic influenza, but we know that is simply a label which is current. There could be many different kinds of diseases. The idea of a new quarantine act is as important to Canadians in protecting their health and well-being and their futures as is the anti-terrorism legislation. They are all pieces of a puzzle that are put in place by responsible governments to protect citizens.
That is why I felt quite free to use what I saw as a contradiction between the extreme measures of anti-terrorism legislation and activities and the extreme amount of money put into those things, as compared to the efforts and the money put into protecting us against disease, which threatens our health, and extreme weather events, which threaten our health, our lives and our property.
Perhaps that will explain to the parliamentary secretary why I chose to use that example.