Yes.
If Bill C‑293 is all about planning and thinking, I'd say those are already powers amply available to the federal bureaucracy. So there's no need to legislate. All this is already possible and permitted. Otherwise, we're talking about giving the government coercive powers to force things through, particularly with regard to harmonization with the provinces and attempts to standardize. If that's the case, I think we're putting our energies in the wrong places.
When I heard Dr. Ross, with respect, talk about a registry for the training of health care personnel, I thought to myself that we were then touching on the field of education, which is a provincial jurisdiction. It's normal that at the federal level, we don't have this information, because it doesn't fall under federal jurisdiction. Professional corporations, which determine who can become a doctor or nurse, fall under provincial jurisdiction, as does hospital management.
The challenge in the next crisis—it may be opioids, it may be an environmental crisis, it may be something else—would be for everyone to get their responsibilities right. The federal government has had its shortcomings, such as border management during the pandemic, which wasn't always perfect. There was also the management of vaccine supplies, which wasn't always perfect either.
So we mustn't let Bill C‑293 become an excuse to avoid doing the imperative assessment of how Ottawa has discharged its responsibilities. It's as if we were in primary school, with good students and mediocre students, and the worst student in the class wanted to teach the other students how to study.
That's not how things works. Everyone needs to do their homework on their own; the federal government has lessons to learn from the last crisis in its own areas of jurisdiction if it wants to better exercise its powers without trying to take control, coordinate everything, and harmonize what doesn't fall under its responsibilities.