Ms. Rempel Garner, thank you for your question.
I suppose I should address the chair, but that's always seemed to me a strange formality. My apologies.
I think you make an excellent point, but I would say two things in response to the question of what we can do now. One is that there are a lot of, if you like, ad hoc possibilities for immediate application of the kinds of capabilities and talent that exist in the federal government.
The security intelligence community is extremely well versed in collecting all-source information and doing professional risk assessments. The problem was that, as I said, PHAC was siloed from that activity and that expertise. In an ad hoc fashion, the thing we need to see being done—perhaps it is being done behind the walls of the security intelligence community—is simply ensuring that the expertise and set of capabilities from the variety of agencies in the Canadian security intelligence system are available to PHAC for an ongoing risk assessment process.
I'm not even aware of the extent to which risk assessments may continue to be done. They were essentially stopped in March 2020 after it was realized that the pandemic had arrived. Now, perhaps they've been restarted. I don't know; I've not seen anything in the public domain on that.
There should certainly be an ongoing risk assessment capability. If we'd had one, it might have helped us prepare for second and third waves and variants and all the things we know of.
The last thing I would say is we just have to be careful to make sure that whatever ad hoc measures we take in our scramble to deal with an emergency don't get baked in as permanent measures. We have to keep our minds on what we ultimately want to achieve.
That's why I think there are some very important structural and strategic things that we need to undertake. A national security strategy.... We need a national security council structure, finally, at the heart of government. We need to have a whole-of-government intelligence collection and assessment capability to deal with not just health emergencies, but a range of non-traditional threats that we're now confronting in Canada.