Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, everyone, for coming.
I will underscore, if I might, the childhood crisis that we have at the current time, despite having a government that's added more to the federal debt than all the other governments combined. I think it germane to really underscore this issue. This is from September 2020:
Canadian childhoods are in crisis according to a new report released today by UNICEF Canada. UNICEF Report Card 16, which measures the state of children and youth under age 18 in wealthy countries, ranks Canada 30th out of 38 nations on the most recently available data from just before the pandemic.
My understanding is that previously we were 10th out of these 38 countries. Clearly, our children are being left, and they're falling behind. This is obviously a significant and weighty issue.
For my colleagues, I think it behooves all of us here to understand that perhaps these six meetings we're having with respect to child health are really going to be a door-opener for all of us to understand that creating a childhood health strategy for Canada, which I think we're all interested in, is going to take much longer than six meetings, but perhaps this will help us focus better on what we really need to be doing here.
Thank you to the witness for hearing that.
Dr. Ungar, I understand that your expertise is in resilience. That being said, obviously this is a huge topic as it perhaps relates to COVID and the ongoing pandemic and the uncertainty that exists. I guess my question for you, Dr. Ungar, is to understand better what you think about how this is affecting children with the ongoing threat of lockdown and the return of those mandates and sanctions, without any realization of the science that goes along with it, and to understand better what might be helpful from the perspective of the government if they were to release this elusive science that they refuse to share.