Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for this invitation to appear before the committee in its study of the current health emergency.
Many things have gone badly with our preparedness and response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The crucial first thing that went wrong was our early warning and risk assessment system. This, I think, must be understood and fixed. Early warning and accurate risk assessments are vital to preparedness and response. They buy precious time for informed decision-making and public communications. They save lives and treasure.
Canada had ample opportunity for proper, early appreciation of the threat posed by COVID-19. Because of what I call an epic failure of systems and imagination, we missed many significant signals as COVID began its relentless march across China, and then globally.
Canada's early warning system was not able to function effectively. The first GPHIN special report regarding a viral pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, was issued on January 1, 2020, but no GPHIN alerts meant for a wider global clientele were authorized. Thereafter, GPHIN issued a series of daily and increasingly voluminous global media scan reports that were not geared for value for Canadian decision-makers.
In the period between January 7 and March 16, 2020, PHAC produced six risk assessments on COVID-19. I analyzed these reports in detail while serving as an expert consultant to the Auditor General. Until the final PHAC risk assessment on March 16, the agency delivered a consistently reassuring message that COVID-19 posed a low risk to Canada and Canadians. As the Auditor General found in her damning report, the methodology employed by PHAC in preparing these risk assessments was deeply flawed and untested. The risk assessments failed to consider forward-looking pandemic risk, and risk assessments were not discussed or integrated into decision-making.
Now, PHAC has accepted the Auditor General's report, as you know, and has promised a lessons-learned review, but it has also punted this review to December 2022 at the earliest.
To understand how we set ourselves up for such an abysmal failure, we have, I think, to look back to the period after the SARS crisis. In April 2004, with the SARS crisis still fresh on its mind, the government published Canada's first-ever national security policy called “Securing an Open Society”. That policy stated:
Going forward, the Government intends to take all necessary measures to fully integrate its approach to public health emergencies with the national security agenda. ...the public health dimension will figure prominently in the Government's integrated threat assessments....
Now, regretfully, none of this happened in the years after 2004.
What Canada must now build is a system for health intelligence that understands and utilizes the model of the classic intelligence cycle to achieve the following: timely, all-source collection; rigorous, high-quality assessment; reporting for impact on decision-making. When COVID-19 struck, not a single element of this system was in place within the federal government. We must also reinforce an international dimension, including full and timely sharing of health intelligence with the WHO as per the International Health Regulations.
A future system of the kind I'm advocating cannot operate within a PHAC silo. To escape from a siloed approach, we need to do a number of things. We need to produce a guiding national security strategy. We need, I think, to create a national security council structure at the centre of government to consider security threats, including health security, holistically. We need to build a health intelligence fusion or watch centre, and we need to ensure contestability by reaching out to experts and stakeholders. These are all concepts being explored in a path-breaking research project on reimagining a Canadian national security strategy for the 21st century, which is being led by the Centre for International Governance Innovation, CIGI, in Waterloo.
Our closest allies understand the need to do things differently. Britain has established, as of May 2020, a Joint Biosecurity Centre to better manage and use information and assessments to inform decision-making. President Biden issued a national security memorandum in January 2021, which calls for the establishment of an inter-agency national centre for epidemic forecasting and outbreak analytics to modernize global early warning.
Canada, alongside its allies, could be a world leader in global epidemic intelligence, but this will take innovative thinking, commitment to meaningful change—including organizational change—and urgency. I hope the committee will share my concern about these matters and lend its weight to this vital reform agenda.
Thank you.