Health committee  No; it was primarily air travel.

Health committee  No, in my opinion, we're not. If I thought we were, I wouldn't be saying what I'm saying. I think we have extensive collaboration with the United States and other countries on the status of various diseases. We know what each country has, so we're quite confident that these mea

Health committee  Certainly there are a number of different issues here. When it comes to diseases such as Ebola, that disease is found in Africa, and it obviously would have to come by air or marine when people travel, so virtually all those exotic diseases would come by air or marine. With othe

Health committee  I have some statistics here. There are approximately 266,000 travellers a day coming in through 119 land border crossings, stations, or the 13 international airports. We can break that down further for you and get back to you. In terms of vehicles, in 2005 to 2006, 36.5 million

Health committee  This is all based on the risk assessment of diseases and the disease status of people coming by land travel. As you mentioned, if that risk assessment changed, then it would be appropriate to change the reporting requirements, but we feel at the present time, with the current d

Health committee  This is dealing, of course, with people crossing borders. On the other issue of mandatory reporting within the country, we are in the midst of negotiations with provincial partners on that. In fact, there was a meeting of ministers in December to talk about reporting and manageme

Health committee  That's not quite true.

Health committee  As you know, with the recent formation of the Public Health Agency, we have a chief public health officer now, and we have a public health network. The public health network is working very actively between the federal, provincial, and territorial partners to improve the capacity

Health committee  We do have reportable diseases in Canada, and we actively review those reportable diseases. Again, as I mentioned, there are ongoing discussions about improving, but there is a provincial jurisdiction here that has to be respected, so we have to work within the guidelines that a

Health committee  Well, it opens the door. If there were some new issue or problem that develops in the future with some different kind of conveyance, we would have the ability to specify that.

Health committee  There could be new technologies, but there also could be a problem that develops within an existing conveyance, which wasn't covered, and you could use this clause to get it done.

Health committee  In the case of animals and food, this is covered by the Food Inspection Agency. In fact, they have veterinarians located at these land border crossings to inspect animals.

Health committee  In terms of having people available at the border when a land traveller is coming across the border, the screening officer, if he sees that someone is ill, will require the person to have a consult with a quarantine officer. Each person is screened by a screening officer. If the

Health committee  I suppose the other issue here is the international health regulations.

Health committee  The other factor in this is that Canada and the United States share a very common health status in terms of infectious disease. So the diseases we're primarily concerned about are ones that are exotic to Canada and would impose significant risk to Canadians. All people coming by