Senator Gold: Thank you. I did attend the committee meeting, though I don’t have the transcript in front of me.

The officials were very clear that the tests that had been procured to date were funded out of existing statutory authorities that the law allows to be used and then be reimbursed. Those statutory authorities have run out. There is simply no legal capacity for the government to enter into contracts — today or tomorrow, if and when this is passed — with the suppliers demanding advance payments. Unless and until Bill C-10 is passed, or some future statutory authority is granted — supplementary estimates at the end of March perhaps; Bill C-8 whenever we might get it — the government is without capacity to find funds elsewhere to prepay or to move forward.

That’s the urgency. The government has no legal authority, for the moment, outside the authority that Bill C-10 would grant, to continue to seek those hundreds of millions of tests that Canadians are demanding, and that provinces and territories are demanding.