Mr. Chair, in 2017, the Public Health Agency had to work with provinces and territories to create the FPT public health response plan for biological events. That would include things like pandemics.
We had started in 2019 working with the jurisdictions to put in place an exercise program so that we could get to a high degree of detail in terms of testing this program. We were fortunate to have a very robust initial planning conference in October 2019. However, unfortunately, COVID-19 arrived. At the request of the provinces and territories, we were delivering under that plan in real time, and so it was not the time to be doing exercises.
For us, a key priority will be learning the lessons from COVID-19 and looking at that plan as well as other capstone plans, our health portfolio emergency response plan and our strategic emergency management plan, to see where there are any gaps and where they need to be updated. Further, I would say that we are working in concert with our key partners across the federal government, including with Public Safety, the Canadian Armed Forces and Indigenous Services Canada.
We agree. We expect that in relation to climate change we're going to be seeing more natural disasters. We also need to keep our eye on the pandemic response, so it's incumbent on all of us to look to see what the upstream activities are that we could do, working with the jurisdictions, including municipalities as well as indigenous communities, to both prepare and to mitigate the impacts of emergencies, including pandemics.