Certainly that's what many of my colleagues have been talking about. Whatever the motivations for this bill and these changes are, concerns about that situation are deepened. We have a situation here in which the chief public health officer will no longer be able to exercise the same level of independence he once had. So in some respects whether the intention is to muzzle, the effect is that the chief public health officer as the chief public health scientist will no longer be able to speak.
My comments were really to highlight the fact that the demotion means he is less likely to be heard when he does speak. Of course now he reports to a bureaucratic agency president, which means that even if he wants to speak, he might not be allowed to. That's a big problem when we have a federal model in which not only does the federal government receive advice from the chief public health officer—of course that's an important part of it—but also our provinces need to have trust in him. The provinces have the majority of health responsibilities in Canada, and if they can't trust that the chief public health officer is basing his advice and public statements on scientific principles rather than political talking points, that's a big problem.