Thank you very much.
In addition to my academic appointment, I'm also director of the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, which has a mandate for Canada, the United States and Mexico but is based out of Toronto. In the 1990s, I served as deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, and later as deputy minister to the premier, and cabinet secretary, in the Government of Saskatchewan. After that I was executive director of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, commonly known as the Romanow commission.
I'd like to start by saying that we live in one of the most decentralized federations in the OECD. This means that our first stop in any national public health crisis will naturally lie with the provincial and territorial governments. From the beginning, provincial and territorial governments have assumed this responsibility in various ways, and they've used their emergency acts and their public health acts to declare states of emergency or of public health emergency in order to close businesses and schools, to prohibit or restrict gatherings, to restrict the movement of populations and, in Quebec, to impose a curfew.
Of course, infectious diseases like the coronavirus are something that crosses borders, and governments need to act in a coordinated way if they're to be effective. This puts a very heavy onus both on federal-provincial-territorial collaboration and on regional collaboration among the provinces and territories, such as we've seen in the creation and maintenance of the Atlantic bubble.
This means intergovernmental agreement and action are essential to make this decentralized federation effective in a time of crisis. There has been some discussion already this morning about the federal Emergencies Act, and some believe that the federal cabinet can bypass this kind of intergovernmental agreement in action by invoking a public welfare emergency under section 5 of the Emergencies Act. However, I think we need to recognize that there are serious limitations to this approach, in part, as already mentioned by Dr. Attaran, with the limitations and protections that are built in to the current act.
In particular, section 5 can be invoked only if the emergency is “of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it”—in other words, if the spread of COVID-19 or the administration of vaccines has exceeded the response capacities of the provinces.
The second limitation is that there needs to be proof that the emergency cannot be dealt with in any other way, through any other law in Canada. We've seen how the Quarantine Act has already allowed the federal government to quarantine and isolate individuals at national borders, and we've seen the use of the Emergency Management Act, which is the framework for helping provinces in an emergency. We heard from Dr. Attaran earlier about the Department of Health Act and about how it could potentially be used rather than the Emergencies Act.
These existing laws allow the federal government to do what is necessary, at least so far, in terms of the supports it's provided to individuals and businesses during the pandemic, as well as directly controlling our national border, including quarantine measures for those entering the country.
Now, even if you think—and Dr. Attaran again has referred to this—that things are bad in terms of contagion in some provinces, or you feel that the vaccination rollout is extremely poor, there's no reason to believe that the federal government could do better by acting unilaterally, in practical terms. In fact, recognizing that the administration of public health care, work sites, long-term care homes, etc., is actually in the hands of provincial and territorial governments, it would be almost impossible for the federal government to implement unilateral solutions to this crisis.
However, the question of emergency powers is a different question from the one of whether the federal government could do more. As a national government, it can and should do more.
We've talked briefly about the setting of national standards, perhaps through existing federal legislation other than the Emergency Act. I am going to focus, however, on the one task that remains, and that's achieving immunity through vaccination.
For the first time that I know of, the government of Canada has assumed the full responsibility and cost of securing vaccines. It should have used this leverage to require provinces and territories to provide additional information and data to track vaccinated Canadians and help determine the efficacy of vaccination. It should provide each fully vaccinated Canadian with an official Public Health Agency of Canada vaccination passport.
In general, it should have been involved and can still be more involved with provincial and territorial governments in the co-crafting and co-implementation of a national vaccination campaign.
We've learned that we can't depend on supply contracts with pharmaceutical companies whose own source of production and supply is outside Canada. We need a domestic production capacity and domestic vaccine research and development capable of anticipating and responding to epidemics and pandemics in the future. We had Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto until it was privatized and sold in the 1970s and 1980s. We need the federal government to work with our university-based scientists and academic hospitals to build this capacity for the next pandemic, to ensure this capacity is sustainable for decades to come.
Thank you.