Thank you, Chair.
On my second round, what I want to come back to is your comment earlier. I thought it was quite interesting that when we were talking about the memorandum of agreement and other standards and things that are not in place, you left the impression with me that we don't need a Dr. David Butler-Jones out there or a senior bureaucrat to manage these issues. What we need is a U.S. General Patton just to go out there and cut through all the nonsense and get to the heart of it. Nobody's ever missed a deadline, we get the job done, and all of that.
There are two ways to look at that. One is that it's absolutely true that there's a lot of useless red tape that's been made up by bureaucrats who are looking for make-work projects. Then there's the other side of it, which is that perhaps the details of reporting mechanisms and agreements and standards and commonalities actually matter in terms of protecting the health of Canadians.
The Auditor General, in her report, and she's very careful about words she uses--she's quite the wordsmith—says:
Surveillance standards ensure that infectious disease occurrences are defined, reported, and recorded uniformly across the country. They are essential for detecting outbreaks quickly and accurately, describing national trends reliably, and planning and evaluating control measures consistently.
She deliberately uses the word “essential”. You deliberately used the words “not essential”--I don't have the exact wording, but I'll stand by the Hansard--when you were talking about the difference between the ultimate goal of information that needs to be gotten and whether the actual details were done.
This stark reality between the Auditor General saying that these are essential and you saying that they are not essential--you used those words--troubles me in terms of whether you're getting where we're coming from or whether this is just a process for you to go through: just write it off as a bad day and go about your regular business.
The Auditor General, in defence of her position, said, in paragraph 5.86: “In its current form, the memorandum is largely a statement of principle and is not sufficient to ensure a complete and timely flow of information between the Agency and the provinces and territories on public health risks and emergencies.”
She goes on to say, in paragraph 5.99:
In the event of a public health emergency, the Agency runs the risk of not obtaining the information needed to do an assessment of the situation within 48 hours, to notify the WHO within 24 hours, and to keep it informed of subsequent events, as required, because information-sharing agreements with the provinces and territories are missing.
The Auditor General says to us, the public accounts committee, that this stuff is essential. You, as the national medical officer of health, have come in and said that it's not essential. Which is it, Doctor?