Thank you, Mr. Dingwall. That does provide us with a good question to ask Health Canada the next time they appear, because it seems a little incongruous when test kits manufactured in Canada are being used all over the world and we're not able to use that technology in our own country.
Mr. Dingwall, I want to direct my next question to you.
We know that after the SARS outbreak in 2006 there was a very comprehensive inquiry and report issued by Justice Campbell and for 14 years some have called that a playbook for how to deal with a coronavirus-like pandemic. In fact, that report in 2006 said, “there is no longer any excuse for governments and hospitals to be caught off guard and no longer any excuse for health workers not to have available the maximum level of protection through appropriate equipment and training”.
The stories are legion across this country that governments and hospitals have in fact been caught completely off guard and that our front-line health care workers are suffering from a shocking shortage of personal protective equipment. We know that in 2010 a federal audit flagged problems with the management of Canada's emergency stockpile of medical equipment and that in 2018 an assessment of the H1N1 outbreak showed that Canada had a shortage of ventilators.
Mr. Dingwall, I'm curious as to whether you, as someone with a lot of experience around the cabinet table, can give us any insight into how we can move forward to ensure that 10 or 14 years from now we're not having the same conversation. How can we take the lessons of the current outbreak now and ensure that we follow through with the steps that have been identified? Clearly we didn't do that after 2006.