By Mike De Souza, Canwest News .

The Harper government says it will release new guidelines this week as part of its flu pandemic strategy to "protect" Canadian workers who deliver critical services, such as paramedics, ambulance attendants, police officers and firefighters. Another set of guidelines for public transit workers will be available in August, said a spokesperson for Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq on Tuesday.Photograph by: Lucy Nicholson, Reuters

 OTTAWA — The Harper government says it will release new guidelines this week as part of its flu pandemic strategy to “protect” Canadian workers who deliver critical services, such as paramedics, ambulance attendants, police officers and firefighters.

Another set of guidelines for public transit workers will be available in August, said a spokesperson for Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq on Tuesday.

These moves come in the wake of a critical letter sent by Canadian municipalities, urging the health minister to show more leadership to protect municipal workers responsible for providing critical services, such as public safety, public transit and water treatment in the face of the H1N1 swine flu virus.

“If you don’t have a plan that ensures that those folks have their needs met, in terms of anti-virals and vaccinations and so on, a serious disruption could occur in critical services, and that would then put Canada’s pandemic-response plan on life support, in a sense,” said Berry Vrbanovic, a city councillor in Kitchener, Ont., and second vice-president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

Safe drinking water and waste-water treatment, for example, depend on municipal workers being healthy enough to get to their jobs at facilities, Vrbanovic said. Public transit operators are also essential in helping doctors, nurses and public health-care workers get to work in large urban centres, he added.

The government says it’s also working on a “Vaccine Prioritization Framework” to protect Canadians from the H1N1 virus, but it must still consult with provinces and public health officials before finalizing the new document.

“It is undergoing the careful and thorough review that is necessary to ensure that all relevant factors are considered in this important document,” said Aglukkaq’s spokeswoman, Josee Bellemare. “The Government of Canada is working with provincial and territorial officials to develop an approach on how best to deliver vaccines to all Canadians who wish to be inoculated.”

The SARS outbreak, which mainly affected Toronto in 2003, cost the economy up to $1.5 billion, according to an evaluation by the Conference Board of Canada. But Vrbanovic said a more widespread pandemic could result in more substantial losses across the country.

 The basis of a solid pandemic plan is to ensure that both your health-care workers and your other municipal frontline workers provide the basic services that are necessary to keep our communities running, and that our economy can operate as effectively as possible,” he said.

He added that the federation welcomes new federal government guidelines and efforts to co-ordinate a national response with provincial health ministers. But he said it’s time to turn those guidelines into concrete actions before any serious outbreak occurs.

“Fundamentally, once all this is done, I think it’s necessary that any guidelines that do come out aren’t simply filed and forgotten in Ottawa, but that they’re put to work in communities from coast to coast to coast in this country, protecting Canadians where they live and work, whether it’s one of our smallest communities or one of our largest cities.”