I'll welcome Ms. Hogan, whom I've had the privilege of working with quite closely on public accounts. I'm one of the few MPs who have the privilege of going back and forth between these two committees.
I want to open up my line of questioning in a way that is respectful. This is certainly not going to be any kind of “gotcha”, but I need to address some inconsistencies that I have experienced between the reporting and the testimony at public accounts and the reporting and the testimony we're having here. I'm going to try to do it in such a way that it's clear, to allow you and your staff to think about how this might be perceived in the public.
I think about the questions that are critical in any audit or in any reflection on work that is this serious: What did you know? When did you know it? Also then, what did you do about it?
You may recall that on April 13, in a line of questioning that I had to Ms. McCalla, we were talking about the ways in which both provincial and federal modelling and our surveillance systems quite frankly failed to identify through PHAC that there was an issue for the pandemic.
I asked whether there was international modelling based on experiences in places like China that would have predicted the outcome. Ms. Hogan put the question to Ms. McCalla, who stated that the risk assessment is called for in PHAC's pandemic plan and that the WHO did issue a pandemic risk announcement and called attention to the risk of COVID-19 for the global community. However, we found that, at that time, PHAC did not update its risk assessments and did so only in mid-March at the direction of the chief public health officer.
I responded, “Then there was an alert. We were alerted to this in advance.”
Ms. McCalla responded, “There was an alert by the WHO, yes.”
I then responded, “My God.”
I would like to ask Ms. McCalla, through you, Mr. Chair, when that initial World Health Organization alert came to PHAC.