Mr. Speaker, I will not try to do 20 minutes in 2 minutes, but I will make my opening comments.
When the act was last seriously looked at, the world was a very much smaller place. The idea that one Wcould start in Europe and be in Canada eight hours later, as opposed to six months later or four months later, was an unheard of concept. Therefore, keeping out communicable disease was probably not foremost in everybody's mind.
People would be cognizant of the tremendous tragedy that communicable disease brought to their own countries. We only have to look at the number of people who died of plague in those days, of smallpox, to know that it was a tragedy, but within countries. The idea that tragedy would travel across the water to a continent that many people could not name or would never see was not there.
However, we live in a very different world. Many people move around the world, either for work, or for leisure or to visit family, with great frequency. People fly to Australia, some fly to England for the weekend. Some of my family did that for some time.
With so many people travelling, the potential for communicable disease to move from country to country is significantly—