I'm happy that you finally got it right for me as “Dr.”, for a change.
With all due respect to Don, I think this is a complex motion. For example, he rightly pointed out that in the preamble it does say that you're looking to “examine all issues” related to the situation. That kind of detail is something that takes time to fully appreciate, to read and to read again, and ask, “Well, is this an inclusive list? No, it's not an inclusive list.”
However, what's in my mind, having spent a bit of time writing health legislation, is that I would have thought the consideration would be that when you make a list, there is a kind of a supposition that those are the priority issues. Okay, you can add other issues, but you have decided to delineate what you think the major issues are, and I think you've missed some. You've missed some of the big issues. For example, there's nothing here about the global response to this pandemic. This is something that's affecting everyone in the world. I think it certainly ethically becomes us to consider what's happening in other countries and our role as Canadians in addressing the difficulties faced by people in other countries. Just as it is in Canada, it's even more so in poor countries that it's the poorest people who are most often adversely affected. There is nothing on this list to suggest that this is at all a concern of ours, nor is there a suggestion that we perhaps have to look at the global health response and look at the future of the global health response in order to prevent this from happening again.
The International Health Regulations give the World Health Organization the authority to issue recommendations in response to an outbreak of disease or a public health emergency of international concern. These obviously need revising. There are things that could be done with those to perhaps make them more effective. One example is a proposal in the International Health Regulations that the WHO be given the power to be able to send independent observers into a country early on in order to determine whether there is something developing. That's not on your list either.
A big concern, as I said before, is indigenous communities. What happens if COVID gets into the indigenous communities? It's not on your list. There's the disruption of the medical health system and the harm to people because they don't want to go to the hospital because of COVID. People aren't going in when they have their heart attacks. We're not doing the investigations we need in order to detect and treat cancer. This has been a pretty major theme and a pretty major concern. That's not on your list. Schools and day cares have obviously been a really big concern in the last month now that schools have restarted. That's not on your list.
You chose to write a list here, and these seem to be our priorities. Why don't we work collectively to decide what our priorities are, rather than you kind of dictating a list of what we think the priorities are? I think you got some of those priorities wrong. The very first thing you talk about is testing. I have to look at the actual wording, because there again, I don't think you got it quite right. You say, “rapid and at home testing approvals and procurement process and schedule, and protocol for distribution”. You're not even looking at the science, the public health of testing, the rationale for testing and how much you can rely on a test. These are fundamental. That's what you do as a doctor. You decide, when you do a test, what you're going to do with that test. This is somewhat complex. It's the negative predictive value of a test you're looking at. This takes time to explain. When you talk about rapid testing, you have to consider the negative and positive predictive value, and that's complex. It depends on the incidence of the disease in the population. You're just jumping right to the conclusion that we want to do rapid testing. Well, I think it's a little more complex than that.
I think, without the Liberals, you've decided that these will be the things we ought to be examining, and I don't think you got it quite right.
That's one thing, and there's certainly no attempt to prioritize what we're going to do. Heck, if we were to have one meeting on each of these things, I don't know if we'd even have time before Christmas to do all those things.
The second thing, a big concern, is the procurement of documents. As Darren has said, certainly a consideration for all of us ought to be possible implications on our relationships with the provinces. Obviously the provinces take the lead in health issues. They have jurisdiction constitutionally for health care. A lot of our response to the pandemic has been in concert with the provinces. Having a good relationship with the provinces is absolutely fundamental. If you're asking for all emails and all communications, I would think almost inevitably there are going to be some things that could potentially harm our relationship with the provinces. It would seem to me that this might not be a really wise idea at this time when our relationships with the provinces are so important.
Thank you.