Public Accounts Committee on April 20th, 2021

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Did you get your experiment wrong, Mr. Stewart?

[Iain Stewart]

In each instance of the moments where we try something to respond to a situation, we're going to have things that work and things that don't work.

In this specific instance, I think we can take stock of that as part of what the Auditor General is advising us to do and make an assessment about how to do it better next time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much.

Your time is up, Mr. Bachrach. Two and a half minutes go quickly.

For the next five-minute round of questions, we have Mr. Lawrence.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to follow up my colleague's questioning.

First of all, I will read the paragraph right under paragraph 8.82, which is paragraph 8.83. The Auditor General said:

Five rapid risk assessments were prepared from January to mid-March 2020 to inform the public health response. All except the last risk assessment, which was prepared on March 16, provided an overall ranking that assessed the impact of the virus as low. Because these assessments did not consider forward-looking pandemic risk....

Mr. Stewart, do you think those earlier assessments were flawed?

[Iain Stewart]

I think the Auditor General identified a key consideration that was not part of the risk assessment and I think, therefore, it impacted the overall rating result.

Obviously, the future directions the pandemic can be projected to be moving into is going to be a key consideration for the risk it poses. That's part of the area where we're going to have to be improving our tools.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

However, even looking at a static review and not a prospective review—although a warning system should—at the time, on March 12, there were 148 cases in Canada, 1,500 in the United States, 3,000 in Germany, 4,000 in France, and 15,000 cases in Italy, with 1,000 deaths there. How could we have not changed the assessment?

[Iain Stewart]

I'll have to turn to my colleague, the vice-president, who does that group's work, because she can more closely answer the question you're asking, if that's acceptable, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Yes.

[Cindy Evans, Vice-President, Emergency Management, Public Health Agency of Canada]

As President Stewart referenced, certainly the risk assessments would be done at a point in time, and our systems were triggered in Canada immediately following our alert of the pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. That meant the system was ready: It was alerted to and watching for cases coming into Canada.

That being said, the risk assessments at that point in time would have looked at the cases around the world and what they meant on the ground for individual risk to Canadians and transmission. Certainly those cases would have been taken into account and reflected in the risk assessment results.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Looking retroactively, I don't think there can be any doubt that a mistake was made. In fact, the Auditor General calls that out.

Who in your department has been suspended, fired or has felt any consequences because of the failure to react?

[Iain Stewart]

We'll have to go back and look for that. I can't answer that question off the top of my head. We'll investigate.

In effect, you're asking why the risk assessment did not work. In retrospect, it seems that it underestimated the risk available, so what would have been the consequences for those who took the assessment? Your question is noted, sir.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you for that. I look forward to your reporting back.

Who made the final call on what the risk assessment was? Was that the Minister of Health?

[Iain Stewart]

No. That was a staff assessment. That was within my responsibilities, not the minister's.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

I have one last line of questioning for you with respect to the pandemic.

Do you know when the pandemic is going to end?

[Iain Stewart]

There are many different ways to answer that, and I'm not quite sure what you're looking for. I'll point out—

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

The answer is that you probably don't. I'll be fair there. You're putting in a plan within two years after the end of the pandemic. We have variants going on right now and need to get these things fixed now. I understand you, and as a parliamentarian I'm willing to argue for more resources for you, but we cannot wait two years after the pandemic ends to get these issues fixed.

[Iain Stewart]

Okay, I understand your question, sir.

The people who are doing the work are also the people responding to the Auditor General's report. There is no division of teams.

One of the challenges of being audited by the Auditor General in real time—where we are at this moment in time—is that my staff are working immense amounts of overtime. They're under great stress. In our public service employee survey, you can see the impact of the strain the organization is under.

When the Auditor General brings forward a plan of this nature, we talk to the Auditor General about having a management response and how we'll bring that forward. What we're suggesting here is to recognize that right now, with the third wave and in the middle of the vaccine rollout, it's a very difficult time for us to stop the line-work and focus on working on the systems.

That being said, we're trying to set out, sir, the very specific things we can do, will do and are doing. However, as to when we'll achieve it, we're just asking for your understanding, as it's very difficult to set a specific point in time. Frankly, the numbers have been deteriorating in some provinces, not improving, so the strain on the organization is quite large right now.

With some time we will be able to come back and make sure that we have addressed these things. I'd be very happy to come back to report on progress at any time in the year.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lawrence.

We will now move on to Mr. Longfield, for five minutes.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you again to the witnesses, including the Auditor General.

Mr. Stewart, I want to expand on a few of the comments you've made about the value of these audits. This is an interim audit. As you've just said, we're still in the middle of a very serious situation with the third wave. It's more serious in my province of Ontario than in other provinces.

There has been an increase in capacity within your department, with about a thousand or so employees being added to help with the enormous amount of work that needs to be done in real time. Could you comment briefly on the expanded duties these thousand people who have been added to your department are doing?

[Iain Stewart]

There are, kind of, several main sets of activity. If you go back to a year ago or a year and a half ago, we did not have a vaccine rollout machine under Major General Fortin. It just didn't exist. There was a small group who knew a lot about vaccines, who understood the vaccine manufacturing industry and who understood the value of different vaccines and so on, but those, of course, were focused on traditional vaccines, not these new COVID ones. We did not have the ability to purchase, transport from other countries, distribute nationally, work with the provinces on their implementation, do the IT systems, and all these things.

Of that 1,000 people, a significant proportion are just a whole new function that the organization didn't have before.

The same is true with regard to quarantine. As people have pointed out, including the Auditor General, we had a relatively modest complement of people who provided advice to my colleagues, John Ossowski and Denis Vinette, and they were responsive, providing advice to the border services officers. Now we have several hundred people involved in ensuring that people arriving in the country are tested and quarantined and, if we find a positive genetic sequence, making sure that we know whether or not they have a variant of concern.

We have whole new functions in effect that we've had to build out.

Lastly, I'll note that we've been enhancing our science, our public health and our medical knowledge. We've hired several hundred epidemiologists and others in the health practices field to reinforce the health voice within the organization.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you.

I know that you're also using other contracted labs, including a lab in Guelph, Ontario—which is my riding—so you're really building capacity at the time of a pandemic.

The test was going to happen in March 2020 that was scheduled from 2018, and now you're doing it in real time, so I'm actually going to add my compliments for the work that you're doing and for your answering the call and the challenge to stand up for Canadians.

However, yes, there are things that we need to improve.

I want to pivot over to the Auditor General, Madam Hogan. I'm concerned about paragraph 8.51 in your report, which says the following:

The Public Health Agency of Canada should, in collaboration with...provincial and territorial partners, finalize...annexes to the multi-lateral agreement to help ensure that it receives timely, complete, and accurate surveillance information from its partners. In addition, in collaboration with provinces and territories, the agency should set timelines for completing this agreement.

Another part of your report talks about incomplete information from provinces, which hindered the progress in interpretation of data by the Public Health Agency of Canada. I wonder about the work of the provincial auditors general in coordinating the next audits so that we can see what in their systems is working, what isn't working and how we could maybe collaborate on some of the data-sharing that's so critical. This would include data-sharing on vaccine rollout—which, as Mr. Stewart just said, is another responsibility—and the concern about not getting vaccines distributed properly throughout provinces and territories, which is within their mandate constitutionally to do. Could we look at that via an audit through the provincial organizations?

[Karen Hogan]

The member's questions are always very involved. Let me try to answer all of those items.

I'll start, maybe, with the health surveillance information. Definitely, we saw throughout the audit that there was some difficulty in obtaining timely and complete information. I think we all have to acknowledge that the pandemic complicates matters and that, at times, provincial organizations were likely responding and couldn't always provide the information in the needed way. However, that information was needed to help evolve and alter the response.

What we found is that in only about 10% of the cases were symptoms included on the forms at the early stages of the pandemic, which really makes it difficult to understand how a virus might be evolving and how a nationwide response should be formulated.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you.

[Karen Hogan]

Oh, can I continue?

I'll talk really quickly talk about collaboration. I'll go really fast.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Go really quickly.