Thank you for inviting me, honourable members of Parliament. I'm very happy to be in front of you this morning.
I don't have a formal presentation to give you this morning but I gave a few slides to the clerk. I'm sure he will be able to send you my presentation where you will have some data to cover what I will say.
Talking after my colleague Dr. David Fisman, whom I know well, I completely agree on many different topics and I want to underline a few important points.
I would summarize that Canadians did very well throughout this crisis. I think we have to be very proud of ourselves because if you look at all the G7 countries in terms of rates and mortality we're probably better than many others except Japan, but Japan is a very specific case. If you compare us to the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and the United States, we did very well as Canadians. People were very disciplined throughout the crisis in general.
In terms of our global response as a country we didn't do that well. This is where we have a few challenges for the future, and these types of challenges will happen again. We're in a world where emerging infectious diseases will be on the menu for the next century. We travel more, and we have many ecological issues in deforestation, which is a big thing for emerging infectious diseases, because you have these viruses stuck in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Until you start destroying the forests you won't be able to see them.
We can travel around the world like never before. We're a country where one of its health.... This population comes from all over the world. Because of this, we're travelling all over the world. I think it challenges us in the future that we should have a system in place to be able to limit the impact of these emerging conditions.
There are a few things here.
The strength of our system is that we have federal and provincial levels. This is also a weakness of our system because we had a lot of bickering between the different provinces and the federal government in terms of who is responsible for what.
Personally, not as a physician, but as a Canadian, in the future I would expect my federal government to step in very quickly and use all its power to try to contain a pandemic like this. For example, we had great military forces that were deployed to a certain point. We had the experience of having our armed forces in Quebec, but having the potential and the availability of our soldiers helping the Canadian population with logistics whenever possible would have been great. I think there are examples around the world in immunization where the army played a very important role in logistics.
Closing the border was also a big thing. I understand from a political standpoint it was very difficult. It was probably the biggest challenge we had as a nation since the last world war. From that perspective for all of us who were born after 1945, and even for the others who were probably children during the Second World War, there hasn't been any challenge as big as this one in our lifetime. It's extremely difficult to go from an ordinary life to an extraordinary life very quickly.
From that perspective, having in place all the measures to be able to close the border quickly and to implement certain rules quickly in isolating people, quarantines, etc., will be very important.
The biggest challenge, and it's our only way to get out of this, is the reindustrialization of the Canadian economy, which is mostly for medical equipment. We had to struggle for masks, ventilators and tests, very simple things. We're testing hundreds of thousands of people every day in this country, but you have to realize that all the equipment needed for the tests is very difficult to get. Much of it is coming from abroad; sometimes you need a plastic pipe head, which was not available in this country, and we had to compete with the rest of the world to get them.
I think that strategically a country like ours should be able to muster this in the future and make sure we won't be caught a second time without an industrial base to be able to do this.
The second thing which is really important, and I think I will—