The short answer is no.
When the agency was established, I was part of the grand debate on what the role of the Chief Public Health Officer should be, who that person should report to, whether the agency should be inside government or outside of government, and so on, but I was not expecting that I would have to live with those recommendations. As I look at it, I don't really think there would be much advantage in that idea. I've been able to speak to the issues that I need to speak to.
Public health ultimately is a local jurisdiction. It is a local activity. It's important that local medical officers have it. If you look at what I said six months ago and what I'm saying now, other than where things themselves have changed, what I'm saying hasn't really fundamentally changed.
However, there has been a seeking out of different views, predictions, and recommendations, and that has confused the picture, because it gets play in the media as one scientist versus another, as opposed to 99 to 1, or all the chief medical officers in the country versus somebody who happens to work somewhere and has the title of doctor. That's part of the system. Whether you have a unitized system or a federation, as we do, I think that would still occur.
It is important to adapt things locally. It will vary a little bit. You don't see this level of scrutiny, interest, and comparing and searching for differences anywhere else in the world, even though those differences exist and even in unitary states. How it's carried out in one county in the U.K. is not exactly the same as the way it's carried out in another county, but here it's an issue, a media issue and a controversy, as opposed to being seen as just the way public health does business.
The short answer was the first one; I'm not sure it would ultimately make much difference to this situation.
What has made the biggest difference in terms of the positive things and the speed with which we've been able to come to ground on these issues is our public health network system. There's collaboration around the country. There is joint decision-making and planning with the provinces and territories, which then work with their local health authorities and bring together the expertise to address the issues. Very quickly you see people learn from the experience, and they apply it and share it across the country. That, in a federation, is a huge challenge.
Getting to those answers quickly is to the credit of the people at the local level and in the provinces and territories. I'm not sure it's so much a credit to us.