Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses who've joined us today. Your opening statements were quite helpful in shaping our discussion today.
I'd like to start with Dr. Murakami Wood. Witnesses in our previous sessions, as well as expressions today, have been about understanding how important data is for creating evidence-based policy when it comes to public health, particularly in the pandemic that we're in. I agree with you that this is in some ways a dry run and a learning curve for many experts, not just here in Canada but throughout the world.
We've seen countries, municipalities and provinces trying to navigate this pandemic with deficits in data and trying to shore that up in working with good datasets, such as Telus's “data for good”. We know from PHAC that they've used this data at the federal level. We also know countries like Australia, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Columbia.... The list goes on and on.
Dr. Murakami Wood, in your opening statements you said that evidence-based policy needs datasets, and it can be a good thing. In this particular case, you felt there was no suspicion of individual surveillance. Could you talk, first, about the importance of a data-driven approach? Also, you said there have been concerns about whether depersonalized, aggregated data can be re-personalized, but your comments seemed to indicate that in the case of Telus's “data for good” that wasn't the case.