Evidence of meeting #44 for Health in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was doses.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
I'm specifically referring to the five classes of travellers that you outlined in your remarks, not necessarily anything else. That hasn't been implemented yet. Is that right?
Panel Co-Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Supercluster, COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel
That's correct. I understand that, from what we've heard—
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Thank you. I just have limited time.
On page 9 of the report, you note that the “hotel quarantine of up to 3 days is inconsistent with the incubation period of SARS-CoV-2.” Can you expand on what you mean here?
Panel Co-Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Supercluster, COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel
Absolutely. The evidence, as we know, is that the incubation period for SARS-CoV-2 is approximately seven days, so being in a quarantine accommodation for three days does not necessarily provide the protection the population and public health officials would want.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Do you think that the hotel quarantine was perhaps just a deterrent to travel?
Panel Co-Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Supercluster, COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel
I don't know why it was implemented. The other reason that we suggested changing it and eliminating these provisions is that it's being applied differently to land and air travellers. Therefore, it was really not fulfilling the purpose for which it might have been implemented because you're not catching travellers who come across the border—
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Do you think the hotel quarantine requirement should stay in place for any traveller?
Panel Co-Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Supercluster, COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel
We've recommended, as you know, that the mandatory requirement for the hotels, the government-authorized hotels, be replaced and not be continued, that it be replaced with a more comprehensive and close monitoring of at-home quarantines.
There would need to be—and I think we note this as you'll see in the report as well—
Conservative
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you, Ms. Paish and Ms. Rempel Garner.
We go now to Dr. Powlowski.
Dr. Powlowski, you have six minutes, although I understand that you wish to pass four minutes over to Ms. O'Connell.
Go ahead, please.
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
Yes, and please hold up your red card when we're on to four minutes so that I know that.
My questions are for Dr. Hoffman. Certainly the question of when and how we reopen the border is absolutely important, but I would suggest that an even more important issue is the global governance structures with respect to health and particularly the spread of infectious disease. As much as vaccines have been the answer with respect to managing this pandemic, this is certainly how we can do better in the future.
With that in mind, I want to ask you, Dr. Hoffman, a question about the international health regulations that were passed by the World Health Organization in 2005 in response to the SARS pandemic, though I'm not sure if it was ever actually categorized as a pandemic. This was supposedly establishing a mechanism for WHO to deal with an outbreak of an infectious disease like this. A committee determines what is classified as a public health emergency of international concern, and WHO then has the power to deal with it.
Dr. Hoffman, are the international health regulations a sufficiently robust document? Can and should they be reformed, or should we have an international treaty?
I expect you can speak for the rest of the four minutes on that, so go ahead, Dr. Hoffman.
Professor of Global Health, Law and Political Science, York University, As an Individual
Great. Thanks so much for the question.
I would succinctly say that our global governance systems are not up to 21st-century threats, as we're seeing with COVID-19. There's a full range of different threats for which they are not up to standard.
When we look to the World Health Organization, we see that it is the leading [Technical difficulty—Editor] authority on public health, but for at least a couple of decades, it has been chronically denied the resources that it needs to actually carry out its job effectively. We're at a point now where only 20% of WHO's budget is funded by core contributions. Eighty per cent is conditional. It's voluntary. The organization can't count on it, such that when bad things happen, like COVID-19, the organization is left to scramble.
Now there are the international health regulations, which are the legally binding instrument that govern how 195 countries around the world are supposed to respond to outbreaks, but it is itself a rather weak instrument. It was revised most recently in 2005, as was mentioned.
Its origin, though, is actually 1892. It used to be called the international sanitary convention. Again, we are using mechanisms that don't have compliance mechanisms and don't have sanctions if countries don't follow through. As a result, most countries in the world are currently violating that binding international legal agreement.
Consequently, there is a proposal on the table for a global pandemics treaty. Every global health law professor in the world, myself included, would be supportive of that. The reason I can say that so clearly is that I currently chair the Global Health Law Consortium, which is a network of all the world's global health law professors.
If you bring different law professors into the same room, we all disagree on basically everything, yet the one thing we agreed on is that the international health regulations need to be reformed. They need to be strengthened, and there is also consensus that there's a big opportunity with the potential global pandemics treaty.
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
Thank you. I think I will give it to Ms. O'Connell.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you.
Ms. O'Connell, please go ahead. You have two and a half minutes.
Liberal
Jennifer O'Connell Liberal Pickering—Uxbridge, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Paish, I just wanted to follow up on the questions around quarantining. I won't have enough time to get into all of the details, so forgive me if I'm speaking a little fast. I understand the phased approach, and I think that makes a lot of sense for those five categories. You can't just open it up immediately. There would be an influx in terms of having to deal with that, so with that phased approach, I think the government has already committed to some of those elements moving forward. However, you also talked about the land versus air border.
I think there is a conversation that I may not have time for here in terms of the risk profile of being on an airplane and in an airport, versus in your own personal vehicle going to your own personal residence, but you said something there. You said that it's about catching travellers. Is there not some acknowledgement that when dealing with the quarantine hotels, it's not about the incubation period. It's about the testing and ensuring that those test results come back negative before someone would move on to their community. It's about catching those positive cases so that they aren't spread into the community first. This is something that provinces and territories spoke a lot about.
Did you hear that from provinces and territories in your work, in terms of ensuring that enforcement of quarantine after travel and before the negative test result is in place?
Panel Co-Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Supercluster, COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel
Let me just summarize very quickly again what the provisions around those hotels are.
Right now, it's not being applied equally to land and air travellers. We saw a lot of evidence at our panel that travellers were choosing to fly from an international destination into a United States airport and then drive across the border to avoid those quarantine hotels, so it's not working in that context and it's very expensive for taxpayers to administer these hotels.
We also received evidence that arriving at a land border, a traveller could [Technical difficulty—Editor] hotel by paying a fine, which completely undermines the purpose of the hotel. As I mentioned, it doesn't comply with the incubation period for SARS-CoV-2. When we presented to the FPT health officers, as well as the ministers, we did not get any specific comments or questions that disagreed with the approaches we were taking. We were all, I would say, ad idem that we are trying to reduce the importation at the borders and that the current approach could be improved.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. O'Connell.
We'll now go to Mr. Lemire.
Mr. Lemire, you have six minutes.
Bloc
Sébastien Lemire Bloc Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My question is for Dr. Bamji.
First of all, I'd like to thank you for being with us.
The pandemic has highlighted the fact that investments in basic research are paramount, as they have an impact on people's daily lives; they help prevent diseases, cure people and deal with the climate crisis, just for starters.
We need to stop compartmentalizing everything and seeing increased funding for basic research as simply an expense. Instead, we need to see it as a societal investment, one that allows society to better develop over the long term.
Do you agree with that and, more importantly, can you explain your point of view?
Professor, Canadian Association for Neuroscience
Thank you.
I absolutely agree with you. This is why we believe that funding fundamental science—and by fundamental science I just need to kind of explain that it is non-targeted. You don't say, here's $2 billion towards COVID or whatever, because we don't know where the next big important crisis is going to be coming up. Canada has always been able to compete on the world stage and also been able to provide help whenever we have needed to, for example, in the SARS situation, as well as in the COVID situation.
We used to be funding science very similarly to the other G7 countries, and now it is going down. The actual research funding is going down. Our ability to compete is going down, and we're in a very dire situation. When you're funding 14% of the project grants that are coming in, you're not funding the majority of the really excellent applications that are coming in.
Thank you.
Bloc
Sébastien Lemire Bloc Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
Dr. Bamji, the COVID‑19 vaccine race made us realize that basic research is essential to enable innovation and that the exploratory part of the research feeds into the applied research, as it is the tip of the iceberg that we see more of. In short, messenger RNA vaccines are, after all, the result of basic work that began in the late 1970s and has never stopped since.
Given the importance of basic research, do you consider the latest investments proposed by the government to be sufficient, given that they have been greatly reduced over the past 10 years?
Professor, Canadian Association for Neuroscience
Once again, absolutely, I totally agree that we're reaping the fruits of what we sowed a long time ago with respect to mRNA vaccines. That was started, again, back.... A Canadian researcher at Harvard contributed to this as well.
Right now we are unfortunately not funding at the proper level that we would need. I would say that we would need to fund about 25% of the grants that are coming in to appropriately fund the great grants that are coming in at the moment, especially when it comes to mental health.
Because I am a neuroscientist and president of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, we are really quite worried about the mental health situation. The mental health work that people have been doing is going to help us to deal with these kinds of things, but it is coming from fundamental science, which we are not actually funding at the appropriate level.
Bloc
Sébastien Lemire Bloc Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
Effectively, as a society, we must learn to prioritize investments and build our future on a solid foundation. Obviously, we need to stimulate the modern economy based on innovation and highly skilled scientific knowledge.
In short, underinvestment in basic research has unfortunately led to a brain drain, a phenomenon that has been ongoing for many years. What do you think we can do to stop this exodus and make Canada an attractive place for scientists again?
Professor, Canadian Association for Neuroscience
Canada is a really attractive location for scientists. Whenever I go to a conference, people are always quite impressed by Canada as a country. We have so much to offer as far as our society goes.
However, when we are sending out applications or when we are actually trying to find people to come to our university, we're finding that people are balking at the investments we are making. They are very interested in coming to Vancouver, for example, to the University of British Columbia. They apply for the actual job advertisement, and then they start digging a little bit further and looking to see how much we are willing to invest—the amount of the average CIHR grant, the ability to get the CIHR grant, the success rate—and that is causing a lot of the brain drain, I would believe.
The other issue is that we are also losing our own Canadian students. The students are looking at us frustrated, writing grant after grant and not getting funded. The students are saying to themselves, “I don't want this lifestyle.”
I have only one student who has gone on to continue in an academic setting. Many of them decide to leave academia. They go into industry, etc., and that is because they are horrified by what they're seeing. We cannot disillusion our own trainees like this.