Health committee  There are two firefighter groups: the international association and the Canadian association. We have had most of our contact with the Canadian association. We had face-to-face contact with them maybe a year ago or so, and before that, we had a number of interactions with them.

Health committee  I'll have to talk fast. The annex you're referring to is linked to the 2008 pandemic revision to that annex, annex D. In terms of status, those annexes would have been approved by the Public Health Network Council, and sometimes by the Conference of Deputy Ministers of Health.

Health committee  Personally, I think it would make it less flexible, less scalable. Clearly, given that pandemics are unpredictable, it makes it very difficult to try to force ourselves into a corner. A classic example is what happened in 2009. We developed a plan based on a 1968 scenario, and th

Health committee  I don't know if I'm the best one to respond to that, as opposed to Dr. Hanley, given that it's sort of a provincial issue. How and why certain jurisdictions make their decisions is really up to them. We can provide the higher-level plan.

Health committee  First of all, I think Canada was in a very privileged situation because the agency and the National Microbiology Laboratory were all engaged in the outbreak going on in Mexico well before we even recognized there was a pandemic going on. There was an increase in respiratory illne

Health committee  It wasn't a quick decision based on limited data. We had quite a bit at the time. I'll turn it over to Frank.

Health committee  Clearly, we are also learning from our neighbour to the south. The U.S. was experiencing it as well. There was a fair amount of epidemiological data that was floating around and being exchanged under existing international agreements we have between our countries, as well as the

Health committee  I'll give a short version of vaccine 101 here. When the flu virus emerges, a new vaccine has to be made. It is a little more complicated, in that it is a different virus from the standard annual virus. There's an approval process that has to be gone through by the regulator.

Health committee  The military are not the responsibility of public health. The military have their own supply of vaccine that they purchase. They made their own decisions about the vaccine they were getting. They're not on there because it's public health, but they're definitely getting the vacci

Health committee  That's right. Certain groups that are—

Health committee  As part of the purchase of vaccine, they had their own supply going to them. They had their portion of vaccine, out of the overall pot, that was going to the military.

Health committee  Those are good questions. At this point in time, in terms of developing a new pandemic plan that responds to the concerns of the Senate report, we've worked primarily with the provinces and territories, as well as some stakeholder groups, to address the main body. We're hoping t

Health committee  Pandemics in general occur three to four times a century. You can look back 400 years, and what appear to have been pandemics have been occurring with that frequency. Of the ones that we're aware of, every one is different, from the most severe one in 1918 to perhaps one of the m

Health committee  The only other thing I would add to that is that maybe 10 years from now we'll have the first vaccine available in 12 weeks instead of 22 weeks, as we had during 2009, just because technology is changing. In effect, our whole approach needs to be flexible to address it based on

Health committee  We heard no comments to the effect that they wanted more direction. I think the process during the time of H1N1 was really remarkable in that we got all jurisdictions working together, and we at least agreed on the framework and allowed them some flexibility to adapt to their loc