Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank my colleagues for their interesting comments.
Certainly I think the difficulty with continuing to study COVID once a week, every week, is that we're really not gaining any more insight into the disease itself. I would suggest that instead of the committee's actually guiding the study, it's those folks who show up as witnesses who are beginning to guide it. I don't think that really the intent of what we're here to do. I think it's rather unfocused. Given this, it makes it very unfortunate that our continuing to belabour a point that, yes, it's bad, and, yes, we should all be immunized, etc., is not increasing our knowledge and I don't think that's in best interests of the Canadians we're trying to serve here.
Given that we also have a significant responsibility going forward to children, I would suggest using some of the time on children's health—to be determined by this committee—and especially the effects of COVID on them. I have to tell everybody that Monsieur Berthold and I had a meeting with the Canadian Paediatric Society. Their concerns about children's health with respect to COVID are significant.
One of the things I know my medical colleagues will echo with me is that we have to continue to remember that children are not simply little adults and the effects of COVID on children could be astronomical, and are heretofore unknown. I think we need to begin to hear from experts on that because it's also a subject we haven't heard much about in the public, other than on whether or not they should be wearing masks, etc., and those kinds of things. There's a multitude of things that need to be unpacked with respect to children and COVID. If we go on and add other aspects to a children's health study, then, again, we would need 50 months to study children's health alone.
To bring this back to the middle, my point is that I really believe that we are rather unfocused with respect to COVID. I would echo Mr. Barrett's comments, and Mr. van Koeverden's as well, in the sense that I think we need an update after our two weeks of constituency time. That would help us better understand where we are with COVID. If COVID is rampant, though, the question is: Is our studying it further going to be any more helpful? I'm not convinced that it is. If it's more rampant, then we have to look at what measures are going to help make it less rampant. This is not rocket science here.
Studying it more I don't think is going to help. Devoting some of that time specifically to children, among whom we have no idea of the consequences and we.... Sorry, I shouldn't say that. We heard a little bit about that from the speech language pathologist when we talked about reduced rates of children speaking and reduced literacy of children as well, so I think we need to be very cognizant. We owe it to the next generations of Canadian who are coming along. As I said, they're not just little adults. I think we need to be very aware that Canadians are counting on us to look at that.
I think the other thing that's important in this committee is that I thought that we had got beyond our early difficulties. We showed a little bit of flexibility in saying, do you want to add onto this study? Great. Let's add onto that study as well. I'm certainly happy to look at that. I don't think we can go wrong—and certainly I do not speak for the Bloc—if we look at the medical device study and we make it a larger study of looking at breast health overall. I think that's something all of us could get behind. I know I don't speak for everybody, but I think those points are germane.
I would also, though, echo Don's comments, in the sense to say we do have a very full calendar. That being said, it's very important that we understand how we can free up some time. My overall comment on that was let's reduce the amount of time we spend looking at COVID. We're not gaining any traction with respect to that and we have other very important things to study.
Thank you all for listening. I appreciate it.