Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I would like to speak to what Mr. Green just said, and I apologize. I didn't see Mr. Villemure's hand up. I had my hand raised, and that is what I was hoping to do.
I'll be very honest with you. I had a double dose yesterday; I had a flu shot in one arm and a COVID booster in the other arm, and we've had a very good and substantive meeting, so in my mind I was hoping that I could get back to bed, because the fever is rushing up on me.
I find this motion to be very interesting and I appreciate Mr. Villemure's raising it. Since Mr. Brossard brought forward this meeting and his motion, I've had the opportunity to look over what the RFP says, and I have quoted some of it in the past as well.
What I'm really hoping we can tease out in this discussion is the purpose of a suspension when we have Dr. Tam indicating on the record how important this data is. We've seen the provinces using this aggregated data to inform how they've tweaked their COVID response over the past two years. We've seen cities using similar data trends to protect the public.
As a committee, we've agreed to study this very important issue. We've agreed in principle to really look at data protection and the privacy of Canadians in this digital world, as Mr. Brossard so eloquently said. I think it would be very pre-emptive for us to take any drastic measures like this. We need to do a deep dive into this study, which I think we're all very excited and eager to get going on, and I think it would pre-emptive to suspend the RFP. PHAC has delayed the tender date by a number of weeks. I'm sure that if we get our study under way and we start listening to witnesses, if we start scoping out exactly what our concerns are.... At this point in time, given the nature of the discussion and the letter that Mr. Brossard has presented to us, I don't think we have a clear understanding as to what issue we're dealing with in terms of privacy and the scope of these companies.
I've raised this point before as well. We've talked about the difference between mobility data and mobile data. We've talked about disaggregated and aggregate data. With all of these articles that I've cited over the past two years that have been written on this issue and all the work that's been done on this issue, we should not take lightly what we're asking for here. We really need to understand the scope of the issue before we make that decision.
I would encourage members to get the study started first. We can see how we can prevent losing Canadian lives to COVID. Canadians' lives are at risk, and it would be unfair for opposition members at this table to pre-emptively stop something when even the critical articles state that the information out of these RFPs is being used to create a safety framework. It's being used to understand how the COVID pandemic is really shaping our cities and how the transmission rates are impacting what our responses look like.
As I said before, a lot of cities and provinces are using that data. It would be a very bad precedent for us as a federal government to suspend something that our public health officials have been using to save Canadians' lives over the past two years. We need to scope this issue out significantly before we make such a decision.
I am opposed to this motion.