Doctor, thank you for your question. I'll be blunt with you back. That agreement should be torn up and replaced with a law, because it's a voluntary agreement that took a million years to negotiate after SARS.
I don't agree with your point of view that this is a unique situation. SARS was very close to being this, and after SARS, the federal government did a lessons learned study late in 2003, which said that if the provinces and federal government could not come to an agreement that was effective on information sharing, then Parliament should legislate. That was 2003. The information-sharing agreement you're speaking of came 13 years later, much too leisurely, and it still isn't legally binding.
When you have provinces that are slow to deliver information about the epidemic to the federal government, or do so incompletely or do so in formats that are not compatible with the others, making apples-to-apples comparisons impossible to do, this is frankly unacceptable, and it has gone on way too long since SARS. That information-sharing agreement is pretty words. It has not functioned during this epidemic. There are data possessed by the federal government that are not being given to independent scientists to work with. For instance, when PHAC places in the database a case of a person being hospitalized or a case of a person testing positive for COVID, there's no data released about which province that comes from. The province of origin is censored by PHAC.
What that means is that it's impossible for scientists to perform analyses that point you to the hot spots. Of course, in an epidemic, it's the hot spots that matter, but if PHAC is going to be slow sharing information from the provinces and then censor it so as to eliminate any evidence of hot spots, frankly this is, with the greatest of respect, incompetent and it should not be the case in a country as advanced as Canada. I see exquisite location data in the datasets of other countries, such as Singapore, but for Canada it's not there.