Bill C-293

Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Act

An Act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness

This enactment enacts the Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Act to require the Minister of Health to establish an advisory committee to review the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada in order to reduce the risks associated with future pandemics and inform a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan.
It also requires the Minister of Health to establish, in consultation with other ministers, a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan, which is to include information provided by those ministers.
Finally, it amends the Department of Health Act to provide that the Minister of Health must appoint a national pandemic prevention and preparedness coordinator from among the officials of the Public Health Agency of Canada to coordinate the activities under the Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Act .

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

All right, thank you.

The amendment is in order. I believe it has been circulated.

The debate is on the amendment that Bill C-293 in clause 3 be amended by deleting lines 24 to 27 on page 2.

Are there any interventions with respect to the amendment that is before us?

Seeing none, colleagues, are we ready for the question on BQ-1?

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I know you clarified that this was the first amendment, but is this still Bill C-293, an act respecting pandemic prevention?

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

I have a point of order, Chair. It's directly related to the pandemic. It's the opioid crisis as it relates directly to the pandemic, which I believe is part of the bill that we'll talk about here, which, I might say, is an act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Chair, I have a point o f order. The current speaker is completely irrelevant to the subject under discussion. We are currently have business before the committee, which is to do a clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-293, an act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness. He's speaking about the opioid crisis, erroneous—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 83 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health. Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the Standing Orders.

In accordance with our routine motion, I'm informing the committee that all remote participants have completed the required connection tests in advance of the meeting. We have Mr. Davies and Ms. May participating remotely.

Pursuant to the order of reference of Wednesday, February 8, 2023, the committee is resuming its consideration of Bill C-293, an act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness. Today we are going to begin clause-by-clause consideration of this bill.

As you will have been informed by email, we have resources right up until question period, if needed. We will proceed until there is a motion for adjournment, until we get to the end of the agenda or until 1:50, probably, to allow people to get to question period. We'll see how it goes. I just want you to know that the ability to extend is there for us.

I would like to welcome the officials from the Public Health Agency of Canada who are here to answer any substantive questions you have as we go through the amendments. We have Stephen Bent, vice-president, strategic policy branch; Dr. Donald Sheppard, vice-president, infectious diseases and vaccination programs branch; and David Creasey, director general, strategic policy branch. They are here as a resource to us. We also have some folks from legislative services for any technical, legal or procedural questions with regard to the amendments. We are very well supported. Hopefully, that will contribute to our efficiency today.

I'd like to provide you with some instructions and a few comments on how we're going to proceed with clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-293.

As the name indicates, this is an examination of all the clauses in the order in which they appear in the bill. I'll call each clause successively, and each clause is subject to a debate and a vote. If there is an amendment to the clause in question, I will recognize the member proposing it, who may explain it but shouldn't feel compelled to launch into a lengthy explanation—because of the sheer volume. The amendment will then be open for debate.

When no further members wish to intervene, the amendment will be voted on. Amendments will be considered in the order in which they appear in the bill or in the package that each member received from the clerk. Members should note that amendments must be submitted in writing to the clerk of the committee. The ones that were provided in writing to the clerk of the committee to date are reflected in your package.

We'll go as slowly as we need to in order to allow all members to follow the proceedings properly.

Each amendment has been given a number, in the top right corner, to indicate which party submitted it. There is no need for a seconder to move an amendment. Once it's been moved, you will need unanimous consent to withdraw it.

During debate on an amendment, members are permitted to move subamendments. These subamendments must also be submitted in writing. They don't require the approval of the mover of the amendment. Only one subamendment may be considered at a time, and that subamendment cannot be further amended. When a subamendment to an amendment is moved, it is voted on first. Then another subamendment may be moved, or the committee may consider the main amendment and vote on it, which is a procedure you are familiar with from the general moving of motions in this committee.

Mr. Doherty.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Stephen Ellis]

Thank you very much, Mr. Davies.

I will try once again. This time, we are out of time. I want to thank the witnesses for staying later. Those of you not in this time zone, obviously we thank you even more.

That being said, I hope the information was valuable to you all. Hopefully, you enjoyed the discourse we had beforehand.

I have a bit of committee business. This is a reminder to members that the deadline to submit amendments to Bill C‑293 is this coming Friday at noon.

In our next meeting, on Monday, we'll be doing clause-by-clause consideration of this bill, Bill C‑293.

Thank you all for indulging the newness of this chairmanship to me.

Also, on behalf of this committee, I would like to wish our usual chair, Mr. Casey, Godspeed in what he is going through at the current time.

Is it the will of the committee to adjourn?

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

The Standing Committee on Health sat through the entire pandemic. It's one of the only committees to have done so, and there are three of us MPs here who lived through the pandemic on the committee without ever looking to blame anyone. Instead, we looked for solutions.

I believe that Bill C‑293 puts the cart before the horse and that we must first know what happened before claiming to have solutions. For example, how can we explain that the global public health information network could have been so ineffective, failing to raise the red flag in time and allow personal protective equipment to be sent to China, when our own stockpile was empty? The fact that in Quebec our CHSLDs, our long term care centres, ran out of masks had consequences.

Getting the answer to this question seems important to me, and I don't think an advisory committee could get to the bottom of the issue. Without looking for culprits, we first need to know what we've done, what we could do differently, and then propose a plan of action. A law won't fix this; we already have everything we need to do so.

Do you have any comments on the matter, Dr. Barrett?

[Patrick Taillon]

No, this is not an investigation. Bill C‑293 is forward-looking. Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's a diversion to avoid making an assessment that would be desirable. Ultimately, it's up to each administration to do its own assessment.

I think the agency could, on its own initiative, learn from experiences it has had in recent years. I'm afraid that by trying to anticipate a future crisis, we're sparing ourselves the critical examination that should be done to answer questions that are nonetheless quite simple. For example, why was the federal government so slow to manage borders? Why was it so slow to remove border obstacles? Why was it so difficult for it to manage vaccine supplies? These are matters for which the federal government is directly responsible. These are the questions we need to prioritize.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the opportunity.

Again, thank you to the witnesses staying a little extra longer with us.

As I'm sure you're well aware, the BMJ has published a number of articles on Canada's response to the virus.

One of the quotes I will read to you states, “A national inquiry in 2023 is critical. Consistent with reports both before and after this pandemic, we call for a culture of data sharing that enables diverse use by a broader range of users.”

I'll start with you, Dr. Taillon.

Do you feel that this is a national inquiry that Bill C-293 would provide?

[Shuv Majumdar, Conservative, Calgary Heritage, AB]

Thank you very much.

At the onset of the pandemic, the Trudeau government discovered it had dismantled a critical and successful early warning system. When the world began border closures to protect citizens, the “do as I say, not as I do” health minister Hajdu held to an ideology decrying conspiracy theories, accusing critics of being racist and parroting the People's Republic of China talking points and outsourcing critical national interest decisions to a World Health Organization bent on destroying its own credibility.

Bill C-293 is not a pandemic inquiry. It barely begins to assess pandemic prevention and it begs that we pay better attention to what decisions were made in that time.

Dr. Barrett, in the past you've stated that you're a fan of keeping masks on faces and have defended mandates on social media.

Let's see how that played out. The Alberta Medical Association survey cites 77% of parents who have reported that the mental health of their children aged 15 and over is worse than before the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, during the first year of the pandemic, almost 25% of hospitalizations for children and youth were mental health-related.

Let me ask you a question. These mandates destroyed the mental health of Albertans and Canadians, and destroyed small businesses and destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of people who are now afflicted by an opioid crisis. Do you still stand by your comments today?

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

I'd like to talk about animal protection.

A brief sent to us by the Chicken Farmers of Canada criticizes Bill C‑293, which aims to prevent and prepare for pandemics. In it they say that its content is not limited to pandemic preparedness, but includes a negative and biased perspective on poultry farming.

The producers' concerns about Bill C‑293 focus on the type of language used to describe factory farming. The focus is on agriculture in the context of antimicrobial resistance, rather than using the “One Health” approach, and the overlapping jurisdiction of provincial governments in agricultural production.

Further on, they tell us about their strategy on the responsible use of antimicrobials approved by Health Canada's Veterinary Drugs Directorate.

What do you think of this critique of the bill?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

To World Animal Protection, in your submission to the committee, you wrote that World Animal Protection supports Bill C-293 because it takes a “one-health” approach to pandemic prevention, requiring government to address the underlying causes of pandemics.

What is the “one-health” approach, and how does it relate to both animal protection and pandemic prevention?

[Patrick Taillon]

Yes.

If Bill C‑293 is all about planning and thinking, I'd say those are already powers amply available to the federal bureaucracy. So there's no need to legislate. All this is already possible and permitted. Otherwise, we're talking about giving the government coercive powers to force things through, particularly with regard to harmonization with the provinces and attempts to standardize. If that's the case, I think we're putting our energies in the wrong places.

When I heard Dr. Ross, with respect, talk about a registry for the training of health care personnel, I thought to myself that we were then touching on the field of education, which is a provincial jurisdiction. It's normal that at the federal level, we don't have this information, because it doesn't fall under federal jurisdiction. Professional corporations, which determine who can become a doctor or nurse, fall under provincial jurisdiction, as does hospital management.

The challenge in the next crisis—it may be opioids, it may be an environmental crisis, it may be something else—would be for everyone to get their responsibilities right. The federal government has had its shortcomings, such as border management during the pandemic, which wasn't always perfect. There was also the management of vaccine supplies, which wasn't always perfect either.

So we mustn't let Bill C‑293 become an excuse to avoid doing the imperative assessment of how Ottawa has discharged its responsibilities. It's as if we were in primary school, with good students and mediocre students, and the worst student in the class wanted to teach the other students how to study.

That's not how things works. Everyone needs to do their homework on their own; the federal government has lessons to learn from the last crisis in its own areas of jurisdiction if it wants to better exercise its powers without trying to take control, coordinate everything, and harmonize what doesn't fall under its responsibilities.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for their patience and apologize for the digression. It's not that the subject isn't serious and important, but I'd like to reassure you and tell you that, when the Standing Committee on Health receives witnesses, it usually conducts at least one round of questions before moving on to another subject, when the subject is important. We're going to do that now, but I wanted to apologize anyway. This is not the way the committee usually operates. I thought the motion would have been tabled after at least a first round of questions.

So, I return to Mr. Taillon.

I'd like to go back a bit, because over time, we may have lost a bit of the essence of your testimony.

First, you said that Bill C‑293 was unnecessary insofar as you wondered whether legislation was really needed to put forward an action plan. On the other hand, are we to believe that the authorities currently involved are not already developing a plan and addressing the shortcomings of the pandemic?

Did I understand you correctly in this respect?

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

This is an incredibly important topic to talk about. As a committee, we're tasked with legislation. The legislation we are tasked with tonight on a tight timeline is Bill C-293.

Dr. Ross said it's important to hear from people on the front line. Dr. Barrett is famous for saying, “health without knowledge doesn't happen.”

With respect for our witnesses, I move to adjourn debate.