Absolutely.
When it comes to the sharing of health data—and I might turn to Chantal Richard in case I miss something—what was needed in those annexes was getting a common understanding of the types of elements that would be shared and how and in what format they would be shared.
As you can imagine, every disease might have different peculiarities, but basic things like the timeline in which you report—in this case it was decided that reporting was needed every 24 hours—and agreeing on that...because we noted that provinces and territories likely were having difficulty meeting that because very few of the reports came in within that time frame.
We also found that only 10% of the files from the provinces and territories contained important information like symptoms. In an evolving disease, symptoms are needed to inform the response of the country and whether and not it needs to be adjusted.
It's having that basic understanding of who has what role and responsibility, what information should be transmitted and how it should be transmitted, in a timely way.
What happened here is that we saw the Public Health Agency, with the provinces and the territories, adjusted throughout the pandemic to what they were capable of doing. The end result was that it delayed the federal government's ability to assess and better inform the response to the pandemic. It's not that they weren't able to eventually gather all the data. It's just that there were a lot of delays in putting it all together and seeing a global picture.