What I would highlight is that alerts are also meant to alert our international counterparts. If we had done that, maybe we would have changed the response internationally, which may have changed the response, or the need to respond, in Canada.
I agree that the chief public health officer, in following the daily report issued at the end of December and with her knowledge of what was going on around the world, alerted her provincial counterparts, and this did trigger some response in Canada. However, I think no one will really know whether an alert would have caused a global change in the response.
We have a system in place that has issued alerts in the past for H1N1 and SARS, and we saw alerts being issued for other events during the COVID pandemic. What therefore really needs to be clarified is when an alert should be issued, why and what the expected response is once it has been issued.