I think that on all sides of this table everyone appreciates the job that the front line people have been doing. In fact, great people sometimes can overcome poor processes. That's a truism in quality improvement.
I want to go further into the question that my colleague asked on jurisdictional changes. I spoke with someone who was a former chief medical officer of a large population. This person's view was that Dr. Butler-Jones' role should really be one of reporting to Parliament. We know that coordination has been a challenge and that there has been some concern about coordination. When we had the public service briefing, it turned out that nobody was in charge of preparedness in the ministries, really, except for the ministries themselves. There was no one in charge overall.
We did have poor early communication and we saw that the budget spent on H1N1 communication was one-tenth of what was spent on advertising to persuade Canadians that the economy was doing well. We've had confusion and province-to-province differences over whether you should get the seasonal shot or the H1N1 shot. We heard from a lot of front line people that the clarity never got to their level, especially in the early weeks.
My very direct question is this: if we had a system in which the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Chief Public Health Officer reported directly to Parliament, would we have had fewer incidents of confusion, mixed messages, and early ineffectiveness?