Health Committee on May 27th, 2020

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

That sounds excellent, especially when we have hospitals in rural parts where they're shutting down their emergency departments in order to prepare for those surges, etc. I appreciate that.

Ms. MacDougall, we've heard a lot of talk from everybody on the big cities: Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. I come from rural Canada, and we're having a lot of the same issues that you're having. In my community, Envision Counselling and Support Centre, which has centres in Estevan, Weyburn, Carlyle and Oxbow, is being challenged with issues. For example, I had the opportunity to talk to them in the last couple of days and they mentioned things that they're looking at, in particular appropriate data management systems. My understanding is just to purchase such a thing is $25,000 to start and then $6,000 a year just to maintain it.

In rural communities where we have towns that are hours away from bigger centres, we're seeing that people aren't able to escape because there are no jobs. These abusive partnerships are there, where you have spouses who are contained, you have youth who are in there, and there are no transition houses to go to. There are no bus services for them to actually get there—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Could you wrap it up, please?

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I'm wondering if you could comment on that from a rural point of view.

[Angela MacDougall]

Thank you so much for the question and for the comments, and for setting out the context of rural Canada and rural Saskatchewan. I have so much love for Saskatchewan. It's a beautiful part of the world.

Yes, everything you said is correct. For women in rural communities, everything that we've talked about is compounded. As it happens, we've been receiving calls on our crisis line from rural Canada where women and young people are in the homes; and there are more guns as well because of hunting and the lifestyle around outdoor sports. The lethality factors are compounded and, of the deaths that I talked about in my remarks, many of the women were living in rural Canada.

Absolutely, rural Canada faces so many more challenges and we are so far away from addressing those needs. Everything you said about transportation and about having the support services available...but we can go a long way by using technology. We felt so strongly about the importance of having Internet access for women, for everybody, all over British Columbia and all over the provinces in Canada so that women in our rural communities can be able to reach out and connect remotely to services such as ours and others that may be in Saskatchewan, or may be somewhere else, in order to get support and make a plan. Lots can be done through the Internet and if we can build that kind of capacity, we'll go a long way to supporting women who are extremely and profoundly isolated in the way that you've just described.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you.

[Angela MacDougall]

Mr. Fisher.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I want to thank all of you folks for being here today.

Mr. Sauvé, MP Jeneroux touched on the international aid topic a bit. I think many of us can agree that international aid is important, and especially during a health crisis like this.

I'm interested in your views on why Canada ought to provide equipment and supplies to other countries when they are experiencing health emergencies. Doing that helps that country; it helps Canada and it helps the world. I'm interested in your thoughts on why we do that and whether we should continue to do that.

[Conrad Sauvé]

First of all, we need to maintain an expertise. Of course the best way to prevent pandemics is to help address early onset and provide all the support, but also, if we're going to fight this pandemic, we need to help countries eradicate it as well, not just in Canada but in the rest of the world.

We've been providing a lot of support to Canadian institutions. We worked with PHAC at the beginning, and a lot of that expertise we brought from the fact that we have been deploying Canadian medical personnel and running cholera and Ebola clinics around the world. This is where we gained a lot of expertise.

It's important to maintain our expertise in times when we don't have a lot of major issues in Canada. We maintain that by helping others. We're also in a time where we have organized direct conferences for Canadian health care experts in real time; we are having webinars with Chinese authorities, medical authorities on the ground, with South Korean medical experts and with doctors, and with Italian personnel on the ground. Those have usually been successful for us to get in real time what the experience is there and how they address certain issues.

I think we need the same thing. Of course when we're in the middle of something, we need to concentrate on dealing with it domestically, but hopefully, as we come out of this we will continue to share what we've learned and we will learn how others have dealt with the same thing.

Again, I know we've received some gifts. The Canadian Red Cross has been managing the stockpile to help others and we've been doing that quite generously. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that we've also received help from others in this time of need.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I'm sticking with you, Mr. Sauvé. You talked about the first days of the outbreak and how you've been responding. You've been on the ground since the first days, and you talked about capacity. It seems to me that the Canadian Red Cross is always there, or it's everywhere.

In your opening remarks you talked about building stronger capacity. Are you talking about building stronger capacity for COVID for phase one, phase two, phase three or whatever, or are you just talking about the Canadian Red Cross wanting to build stronger capacity? Maybe you can also touch on what those early days looked like. Are you talking early days domestically here in Canada or were you paying strict attention to what was going on with the pandemic in those days?

[Conrad Sauvé]

To start with your second question, early days were the immediate response. We all know about the Canadians caught on the cruise ships who needed to be brought home and be treated in the most humane way possible at the same time as being quarantined. We provided immediate assistance as well as for those in Japan. We're talking about direct operations.

I think the key when we talk about surge capacity is that the Red Cross, as you say, is present everywhere and everybody congratulates us for that, but what you don't see is the amount of training we do to make sure that people, volunteers and pre-positioned materials are ready. We've been talking the last few years about increasing that base capacity to deal with natural disasters. I think we've helped some 260,000 Canadians displaced by fires, floods and so on in the last four years. Now we have an additional component, a pandemic, which requires a little more specialized surge and a little more capacity in terms of infection....

We want to take stock with public authorities on the expectation for the Red Cross to support them at the municipal, provincial and national levels. Then, we want to look at how we increase that base capacity and what kind of equipment we need to restock. I am talking about equipment and about our partnership in supporting provincial health authorities: what has worked, what is needed for a second wave and what is helpful. As a first reaction, we tend to throw everything we have at something. After that, we can say what exactly we need to restock.

I was talking about the north in terms of the 80-bed full hospitals We've deployed parts of those. Again, this expertise was developed on the international side. We are very strong, and this expertise was used efficiently in Canada. When we look at the north, we look at smaller mobile capacity, and we got a lot of requests from first nations communities to deploy equipment and support them.

We're taking stock of the fact that we have to stop treating these surge events as exceptional. We need a standing capacity that's a little more elevated to support all these needs.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Mr. Fisher.

Mr. Desilets, you have two and a half minutes.

[Luc Desilets, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Sauvé, I want to go back to what you said about the $100 million provided by the Canadian government.

We hear that Red Cross funding is slow to reach Quebec. Is that true? What would be a reasonable time frame?

[Conrad Sauvé]

Are you asking me whether funding is slow to materialize to support our operations in Quebec?

[Luc Desilets, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Yes, exactly. We're hearing this from funded organizations. Do you think that this is true, and what would be a reasonable time frame?

[Conrad Sauvé]

The allocation of emergency funding is a broader issue. Obviously, in an emergency situation, we must be able to access funding quickly. The Red Cross had reserve funds that it could use right away. We have the government's support and we're dealing with this issue. This hasn't slowed down our operations in Quebec. The Red Cross showed up when it was asked for help. We've increased our operations significantly.

The funding that we recently received from the federal government seeks not only to meet current needs, but also to establish a fund to increase our capacity more quickly.

I must say that we received support in this area. This hasn't affected the quality of our operations on the ground.

[Luc Desilets, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

I'll provide an example. According to the president and executive director of the Centraide of Greater Montreal, two weeks ago, two months after the start of the pandemic, her organization hadn't yet received a cent. I don't know whether this issue was resolved or whether this is a reasonable time frame. This may be outside your purview. I don't know.

[Conrad Sauvé]

The broader issue concerns how we can provide funding more quickly and implement mechanisms in emergency situations. This is a real issue.

We're holding discussions with public safety and with the provinces about quicker access to funding. We've created reserve funds to deal with these situations. Of course, it's always difficult to access funding quickly. The magnitude of the crisis obviously makes this a challenge.

I repeat that this hasn't slowed down our operations. This is nothing new for us.

[Luc Desilets, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

I want to ask one final quick question.

You helped the seniors' residences in Quebec—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Mr. Desilets.

We go now to Ms. Kwan for two and a half minutes, please.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

On the issue around violence against women, we know that in the face of the pandemic, the numbers are going up. Even at the best of times the situation is bad. In my community of Vancouver East, particularly in the Downtown Eastside, sex workers are particularly vulnerable. We're now even seeing people entering sex work for the first time. Much of this, of course, is tied to economic insecurity. The fact is that the government chose not to go forward with a universal direct payment. People who are in dire straits, people who live in situations of domestic violence, don't have the economic support to find alternatives.

Ms. MacDougall, if the government were to initiate the universal direct payment for all during the pandemic, and, I would argue, post-pandemic, would you support that?

[Angela MacDougall]

Yes, we have definitely made that case; I'm on record. I sent a letter to our Prime Minister and to our province and to the various ministries within the federal government making that request for the reasons you articulated here. We recognize that there is already a lot of gender inequality that is economic inequality and that the pandemic has ground down, in very specific gendered ways, women. There's also precarity around immigration. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Many women have a number of different challenges with respect to feeding themselves and keeping a roof over their heads. That includes women who are involved in sex work and women who may be sexually exploited during this time through income inequality and insecurity as well.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

One of the issues that has been raised is that in recognition of essential workers, the people who are in community services or in the grocery stores and so on, there is courage pay. I'm hearing mixed stories about who is getting the courage pay and who might not be getting it.

Can you comment on that? Are people in your organization, Battered Women’s Support Services, and other organizations like yours getting that courage pay?

[Angela MacDougall]

That is an interesting concept, isn't it? Yes, our front-line workers would be eligible for it. We already built it in. We already did that for ourselves, recognizing that on a wing and a prayer, in going 24 hours, we needed to have all clean hands on deck. We did institute a number of measures, in terms of ensuring that our front-line staff were receiving what could fall under the banner of courage pay, because of how essential this work was and how it was not recognized.

If I may, please, I would like to suggest that one thing it would be really important for the Standing Committee on Health to examine is the gendered impacts, and how the impacts for women have been profound and unique and differential. This is of critical importance.

I would also ask our witnesses to consider the gendered impacts in all of their areas right now, in their areas of focus and influence, and the ways in which women have been profoundly affected under COVID-19. We have a number of inequalities still, and a lack of equity in Canada, so it really matters that right now we are shining a light on the gendered impacts and are seeking to redress these impacts, which goes to the point around pay and courage pay and income equality.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Ms. Kwan.

We'll go to Mr. Webber, who will start round three.

Mr. Webber, please go ahead for five minutes.

[Len Webber, Conservative, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to everyone here today.

My first question is for you, Mr. Sauvé. You didn't talk about this today in your presentation, but I did get this information from the Library of Parliament. They indicate that at the request of the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Red Cross is providing services to Canadians returning to Canada in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Services offered include information services, safety and well-being support, and also meal delivery.

Can you perhaps elaborate on that a little bit and tell me why you are delivering meals to people travelling abroad and coming home?