First, I want to thank everybody for being here.
Pat and Ms. Mackenzie, you both did some amazing work on reports, so I thought I would start with Dr. Armstrong.
In your report about reimagining long-term care.... In our committee we've been hearing from many witnesses and a number of them have made the assertion that public long-term care facilities have performed far better than private during the pandemic. Ms. Langolf suggested in her presentation that phasing out private long-term facilities is the fix we need, whereas I was reading your report, and I thought it revealed that the issue is far more nuanced than just saying if the government were running these facilities this never would have happened.
Clearly, one of the major challenges in the beginning was the scarcity of PPE and the need to ration PPE. In your estimation, what grade would you give the Public Health Agency of Canada on its level of pandemic preparedness, especially with regard to PPE availability and distribution?