Mr. Speaker, I would ask the hon. member, in view of the fact that there was this technical problem that rendered the bill inoperable and that was identified probably 14 months ago, why has it taken the government this long to make this small technical change that would actually make the bill operable?
At the same time I would like to ask the member to actually fact check her remarks in terms of a so-called previous minister for emergency preparedness in terms of the fact that indeed that was the health minister and the fact that it was indeed the Conservative premier of Ontario standing outside, where there was absolutely no risk of SARS, with a mask around his chin. These kinds of optics actually created the kind of alarm and fearmongering that was very dilatorious to my city of Toronto.
In fact, long before the travel advisories, we knew that the Chinese restaurants in Montreal were empty, that there was a real problem in being able to get the information out that this indeed was a disease that one would have to break into a hospital room in order to get the disease. The problem indeed was that we did not have the science of the incubation period, the mode of transmission, or any of those things at that time when the science was lacking.
I guess I also want to know how the member can stand there when indeed the problem was a lack of communication between the Ontario government and the federal government in terms of whether that was one patient who had gone to two hospitals or two patients who had gone to two hospitals. We were faced with the issue of interference and whether or not data sets would be shared because of somebody worrying about whether they would be the principle investigator on a study. This was a huge problem as we learned from the Naylor report.
We, as the Liberal government, took every recommendation of the Naylor report very seriously. We put in place the Public Health Agency of Canada. We appointed David Butler-Jones as the first ever Chief Public Health Officer. We put in a Minister of State for Public Health. We supervised the first public health network for Canada in which 13 jurisdictions in the country would plan public health together in terms of chief public health officers from all of the jurisdictions, knowing that germs do not respect borders and that we did learn the lessons from SARS.
If we learned the lessons from SARS, put all of these things in place, could the member opposite tell us why it took 14 months for the government to fix this tiny technicality that has rendered this whole bill inoperable?