The way I would summarize our audit report on the pandemic preparedness is very similar to how you would. The agency was not as well prepared as it could have been in those four key areas. There was some work done, so I think it's a bit of a balance. There was some work done on emergency plans, but they had not been updated for quite some time, which is not okay. More importantly, the major response plan—the federal-provincial-territorial one—had not been tested, and testing of a plan is incredibly important to identify gaps or weaknesses or lack of capacity.
Definitely, the long-standing issues about data sharing impacted the country's ability to respond in a timely way to the pandemic. For many years, it had been known that agreeing on ways to share information among the federal, provincial and territorial governments was needed, including the IT infrastructure to handle such volume. None of that had been addressed prior to this pandemic, and it needed to be addressed to find solutions during the pandemic.
The third thing was the risk assessment tool. While they did use a risk assessment tool, we found that it was not a tool that considered a pandemic risk. What does that mean? It only considered how the virus might spread once it was here, and not necessarily the risk of the virus coming here and then spreading, so that forward-looking pandemic risk tool was needed. Hence, as you say, it kept the risk rating at “low” until the chief public health officer, in mid-March, stepped in to ask that it be elevated.
Finally, they hadn't contemplated such a scale of a quarantine. There had been quarantines in previous health crises, but not to this magnitude. Again, the agency knew that it didn't have the capacity and hadn't preplanned for dealing with that, and it had to ask for support and help during the pandemic. Unfortunately, they ended up, at the beginning, by being unable to tell us whether or not two-thirds of travellers had properly quarantined.
I believe it highlights a few things. One is the importance and the value of planning and being better prepared. We shouldn't underestimate that. Second, I think it also helps highlight that when you use tools or machine intelligence, as they did for the risk assessment, human judgment needs to be applied to it to make sure it's thinking about all of the factors and not just the ones that might have been input to the tool.