Transport Committee on Dec. 10th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 11 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of September 23, 2020. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. So you are aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entirety of the committee. To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow.

Members and witnesses, you may speak in the official language of your choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of “floor”, “English” or “French”.

For members participating in person, proceed as you usually would when the whole committee is meeting in person in a committee room. Keep in mind the directives from the Board of Internal Economy regarding masking and health protocols.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on the video conference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute your mike. For those in the room, your microphone will be controlled as normal by the proceedings and verification officer.

I remind everyone that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute. With regard to a speakers list, the committee clerk and I will do the best we can to maintain the order of speaking for all members, whether they are participating virtually or in person.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the committee is meeting today to continue its study on the impact of COVID-19 on the aviation sector.

Before I introduce our witnesses, I want to ask you, members of the committee, how long, in fact, you want this meeting to be. It's up to you. It's your choice. Do you want to shut it down at 5:30, as we usually do, which is what we're scheduled to do, or would you like to go for the extra time, which we might be allowed since House resources are available to us?

Ms. Kusie, from the Conservatives, do you have a preference? I'll ask Mr. Bachrach and Mr. Barsalou-Duval the same question.

Ms. Kusie.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Mr. Chair, I think we are considering an additional half-hour, so until 6 p.m. We did that format the other Tuesday, I believe, and it seemed to work well. I don't think we need to do the extended two hours.

I recognize, of course, that we're getting to the very end of this session today and tomorrow, and I'm sure members have things they need to wrap up both in their constituency office and for those of us in Ottawa, as well.

I think that going until six o'clock will allow us to get a good two rounds in for everyone and, hopefully, get the information we need from these witnesses here today. That's my suggestion, to extend the meeting by a reasonable half-hour.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, Ms. Kusie.

Mr. Barsalou-Duval.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will just say that I am very comfortable continuing until 6 p.m. if that is the will of the committee. Otherwise, I will go with the flow. I have nothing particularly pressing. Of course, I have other commitments, but I will be able to adapt if necessary.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, Mr. Barsalou-Duval.

Mr. Bachrach.

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

Mr. Chair, yes, 6 p.m. works well for me.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

That's wonderful.

Thank you for that, members.

Are all members fine with six o'clock?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

It's my pleasure now to introduce our witnesses.

We have Dr. Isaac Bogoch, physician and scientist, Toronto General Hospital and University of Toronto.

Dr. Bogoch, I have to admit that you look kind of young to be a scientist and a doctor. You must have flown through school at a young age.

[Dr. Isaac Bogoch, Physician and Scientist, Toronto General Hospital and University of Toronto, As an Individual]

It's the lighting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Welcome, Doctor.

We also have Dr. Zain Chagla, assistant professor, division of infectious diseases, Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University.

From LuminUltra Technologies Ltd., we have Mr. Patrick Taylor, global business development director, new markets.

Gentlemen, welcome.

I'm not sure who wants to go first, but I was handed an order.

I think I'll start off with Dr. Bogoch first.

Dr. Bogoch, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Dr. Isaac Bogoch]

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the aviation sector. I don't have a ton of time, so I'm going to jump right in.

Let's start with two key issues and then some solutions.

Issue number one is clearly the protection of travellers and personnel, which means crew and others who work in the industry, from COVID-19. Issue number two, of course, is the impact that national and international travel will have on the spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.

Let's start with the first one, which is the protection of travellers and personnel. In general, from an infectious disease transmission standpoint, flying is a pretty safe thing to do. There is a common misperception that people frequently get infections from air travel; however, the perception of risk is disproportionately high compared to the actual risk.

There are certainly cases of infections, especially respiratory infections, transmitted on planes, and there certainly are credible cases of COVID-19 transmitted on planes as well, but these are actually rare events, and they are especially rare when you consider the volume of people travelling. There is growing data, including Canadian data, to back this up.

Why is this the case? You would think that planes are exactly what we have been told to avoid. They're indoors and are close, crowded and confined spaces, and that's where the virus is most easily transmitted, but planes are engineered beautifully, and the ventilation systems, coupled with universal masking, make air travel much safer. There is good data demonstrating this nationally and internationally, and we can delve into that later if anyone wishes.

Number one, people need real protection from infection while flying. Number two, they need to understand how they're being protected and transparency on what and where the risks are, such that they can make informed decisions. This will build back confidence in the aviation sector.

I'd like to briefly touch on another important area, and that's the impact national and international travel has on the spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19. This is a problem.

I’ve been studying this for years and have evaluated how other infections move regionally and globally through human mobility patterns, including via air travel: diseases such as Ebola, Zika, chikungunya and, more recently, COVID-19. We actually even looked at the international spread of this infection in early January, before we knew it was a coronavirus.

As people move, they bring infections with them, and if the aviation sector is to be up and running at full tilt, this has to be acknowledged and addressed. How can we facilitate safe and ethical travel and allow the general population to have confidence that their safety needs are being met? I think we can do this with six big steps.

Step number one is that we have to expand the focus of safety beyond the airplane itself. We should focus on travel, beginning from the time one leaves their home to the time they arrive at their final destination. Attention to each step of travel, such as public transit to the airport, checking in at the gate and lining up to get on the plane, will provide incremental safety to travellers and build confidence in travel, which will help the aviation sector.

Number two is public education, which is directly related to the point above. It's one thing to expand the scope of safety, but this has to be meaningfully communicated to potential travellers to ensure it is realized and operationalized.

Number three is integration of rapid diagnostic tests. There are increasing numbers of products and improving characteristics of these tests. They can be extremely helpful in the aviation sector, and they could be mobilized to tremendous capacity.

Number four is vaccination in Canada. The vaccine rollout in Canada is probably starting next week, and this will clearly provide significant protection and confidence for Canadian travellers. We will likely see public health measures slowly lift as 2021 moves on and more and more Canadians are vaccinated. With more Canadians vaccinated, there will be confidence in air travel, because there will be less fear of people getting this infection.

Number five is global vaccination. We have to support global vaccination initiatives, and we do. There's a program called Covax, which is an international collaborative effort to secure vaccines for low-income countries, and Canada is participating in it. This is clearly the ethical thing to do, but it will also make for safer air travel and build confidence.

Lastly, number six, we really need the active participation of the aviation sector in national and global infectious diseases surveillance activities. This can come in many forms in terms of screening passengers, screening waste water on airplanes, swabbing surfaces, etc., but participation in this process can help national and global efforts to combat the spread of emerging infectious diseases such as what we've seen with COVID-19.

I thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, Dr. Bogoch.

We're now going to move to Dr. Chagla for five minutes.

The floor is yours.

[Dr. Zain Chagla, Assistant Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases, Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, McMaster University]

Thank you, everyone, and thanks for inviting me here today. I will say that Dr. Bogoch stole a bit of the thunder here, so I'm going to follow up with a couple of points, really focusing on some of the infection control implications of flying, to expand on a couple of Isaac's points.

As Dr. Bogoch mentioned, airplanes seem like a terrible idea. They're hollow tubes in which people are stuck together for a significant amount of time, but airplanes do have a specific ventilation system that is incredibly efficient. Air travels up from the ceiling, down around passengers and down through the floor in a laminar direction. It's mixed with external air. There are HEPA filters and there's an air exchange every two to three minutes. To compare that to typical settings, a typical household setting has two to three air exchanges per hour. Most hospitals aim for 15 to 20 air exchanges per hour, so this is in the ballpark of what would be in an operating room in terms of the air exchanges, air filtration and mixing with external air.

It does show in multiple studies. There was a large study done by the Department of Defense in the United States in which they essentially had mannequins with fluorescent tagged aerosols that were kind of spewing out on the flight. There were sensors set up around all the mannequins. They repeated the experiment 300 times in different positions along the plane. It was a Boeing, a typical jumbo jet, and essentially we saw 99.99% of the particles filtered. They lasted in the environment and in any detectable quantity for six minutes, which is again extremely remarkable and is considered to be in line with what we would expect in health care settings.

Add to that that we still have these universal controls on airplanes in terms of masking and other screening, and some airlines even require testing as part of their entry criteria. There are a number of different things that make air travel relatively safe.

I will speak from my real-world experience. I work at McMaster. We've done an interesting study of airline travellers coming off an Air Canada flight at Pearson where they were invited to self-directed nasal and oral testing as part of their epidemiology look. About 0.7% were positive on entry. A good number of those were actually probably people who had acquired it at their location, likely had cleared and had travelled, but there are a significant number, probably in the 0.5% range, that are actually truly infectious on those flights.

Considering that, if you had a flight of 200 individuals, which is not that dissimilar to what you would have on some of the large aircraft, you would have one person per flight who was positive. We see so many exposure notices out there. In the literature there are a couple of dozen case reports of people who truly acquired it on flights, particularly in that early part where we weren't masking, where things were still uncontrolled, and where people weren't necessarily getting it from their destination. Their only exposure would be on the flight. There were very few cases documented in that sense. It really is a good proof of principle that the flying experience is relatively safe given all the controls and the ventilation associated with it.

These studies are very hard to perform now, clearly, because we have such global transmission. If I get on a flight in India and end up in Canada positive, is it from being in India? Is it from being on the flight? It's very hard to detect now because of the global penetrance of this disease.

That really is my two cents' worth. I think from the infection control standpoint, flights are relatively safe, as long as these controls are in place. There's good experimental evidence to suggest that everything in place to go on a flight, as Dr. Bogoch mentioned, everything prior to the flight and everything after the flight, presents a probably much higher risk than the actual flight itself does, as long as the ventilation systems are working.

I think this is going to be part of the safety plan for opening up flying going forward, being transparent about this type of information, particularly with regard to conveying the risks. We're hearing exposure notifications every day for flights into and out of Canada, as well as for regional flights, and when we really put that into a context of the number of travellers who have truly tested positive, their attribution is truly secondary to the flight, which is fairly minimal considering the global literature around global flying even during the pandemic.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Dr. Chagla, thank you.

I'm now going to Mr. Taylor.

Welcome, Mr. Taylor. I understand that you're working off your laptop mike, so the closer you can get to that mike or to whatever you're working with, the better. If the interpreters have any problems, they'll notify me and I'll notify you.

You have five minutes. The floor is yours.

[Patrick Taylor, Global Business Development Director, New Markets, LuminUltra Technologies Ltd.]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to speak at the committee today.

LuminUltra Technologies Ltd. is a wholly Canadian-owned company headquartered in Fredericton, New Brunswick. We were founded 25 years ago and have an extensive history of rapid, portable molecular biology-based diagnostic testing solutions. We are a Canadian success story and a growing company. In 2018, we acquired InstantLabs of Baltimore, Maryland, and just last month we acquired Source Molecular of Miami, Florida.

Prior to the pandemic, we were an internationally focused business with 90% of our customers outside of Canada. We were primarily focused originally on water-related industries, serving the sectors of drinking water, aviation and oil and gas.

I am based in the U.K. and joined LuminUltra in August 2019 as the director of global business development. Today I join you from Mexico, where I've been speaking at the annual conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Air Transport Association.

On March 20, LuminUltra responded to a call from Canada to help build a domestic testing supply for COVID-19. On April 9, we began delivering 500,000 test equivalents per week to the federal government and each of the provincial governments through a contract with the Public Health Agency of Canada. We continue to be the key supplier of COVID-19 testing reagent for Canadian governments.

The daunting challenge of the pandemic has also created economic opportunity. By working with a Canadian company to build this supply, government has enabled us to create the further growth of jobs and economic impact right here in Canada. Since the pandemic, we have hired over 60 additional personnel, have grown our workforce to over 140 and have constructed and opened a new multi-million dollar state-of-the-art production facility in Fredericton.

In May we launched a complete environmental surveillance test for COVID-19. Environmental surveillance testing includes testing of surfaces and waste water for the presence of the virus. By testing for the virus, it's possible to identify if an infected person has interacted with any space, be that a waiting room or an aircraft considered as a possible point of transmission. This surveillance testing is non-invasive and can produce important insight into the health of the population interacting with these spaces.

On November 27, Health Canada approved our complete clinical test. We now provide a complete end-to-end solution for human testing, including consumables, testing devices and testing chemicals. Unlike other rapid tests, our test is built on PCR technology. PCR testing is the gold standard test, providing rapid, accurate results, and unlike antigen testing, it has proven to be much more effective, particularly in identifying asymptomatic or presymptomatic carriers.

Our PCR testing devices range from a small, portable point-of-need device capable of running up to 16 samples in under two hours to a high-capacity unit capable of running 96 samples in under two hours. This is fully scalable as a solution and multiple machines can be run in parallel to run as many samples as needed, again with results in under two hours.

LuminUltra has spent many years working with the aviation industry to understand the unique challenges and opportunities the industry faces. We are seeing the industry use testing to respond to the significant challenges of COVID-19, including in countries throughout Europe where PCR tests are done at airports as the passengers land, requiring passengers to self-isolate while waiting only a few hours for their results.

Supporting investment in additional PCR testing capacity will allow Canadians to complete essential travel more safely by allowing multiple types of testing, including surfaces and waste water, for a more complete and non-invasive insight into the health of interactions; providing opportunity to reduce long self-isolation periods by providing measurable, reliable clinical testing; and establishing best practices as we head into greater vaccine availability, ensuring testing protocols are in place, understood and complied with before travel commences.

The aviation industry has been deeply affected by the global pandemic. While news of a vaccine is promising, there will be a continued need for ongoing testing to ensure that we do not leave our communities open to potential risk.

We are proud to have been part of Canada's COVID-19 testing solution since the beginning of the pandemic, and we hope that we are able to use our made-in-Canada solution to help Canada survive through the balance of the pandemic and thrive and recover as Canada returns to normality.

I look forward to your questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, Mr. Taylor.

We're now going to start our first round of questions.

For six minutes each, we have Ms. Kusie, followed by Ms. Jaczek, Mr. Barsalou-Duval, and lastly, Mr. Bachrach.

Ms. Kusie, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all our witnesses who are here today.

Dr. Chagla, further to your McMaster study, in having met with your colleagues I understand there were two objectives. The first was to see infection rates upon arrival after seven days and after 14 days. The second was to see, given this information, if it was possible to reduce quarantine as we have seen done in other nations.

In your opinion, after the testing was completed and the data you have seen, is it possible to reduce quarantine?

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

Yes, so they've released about a month of data from their initial pilot. They are still looking at the October data from their pilot.

The rate of people who test positive at day seven who don't test positive on the day of arrival is still not insignificant. It's small, but I think it's 0.2% or 0.3% who don't test positive in that first batch, 0.3% exactly.

I think if you capture most of the people in that range, you obviously cut off the people who test positive immediately. That would be the bulk of people who are infectious coming in. It's probably related to their days of experience prior to coming into the country. Then you again have a period of seven days post to deal with people who may have been exposed in transit in airports, people who may have been exposed along their path who should be PCR positive.

You would get the bulk of people if you test them on day seven. Is there a chance of 1% or 2% sneaking out? For sure, but at the end of the day, even the CDC has updated their guidelines for people who are exposed to COVID-19, not in the airline travel but just generally exposed to someone who is probably of the highest risk people out there. That day seven with the test is enough to release someone from quarantine in that sense. So realistically, it should be the same post-flight because the risk is much smaller in that sense. It's not an exact exposure; it's a random chance in that sense.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

My understanding is the one they think it might be, people who are breaking the quarantine due to human nature of course.

Dr. Chagla, why do you think it's taking the airport authorities so long to implement this rapid testing process that other airport authorities across the country...given the relative success we saw normally with that pilot in my hometown of Calgary? Given the success we're seeing there with this operation, why do you think it's taking so long for the government to implement it?

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

It's a good question. I know the people whom I work with intimately at the lab at McMaster are very innovative. They have a lot of capacity to deal with this type of testing. The reality is there's a hierarchy of needs. The highest priority in the hierarchy of needs currently is people who are symptomatic with COVID-19, people who are exposed to COVID-19, long-term care outbreaks and hospitalized patients. With turnaround time still not being adequate for many individuals, it's a question of whether or not you want to expand capacity without the ability to expand and flex that capacity in that sense.

But I agree. There are lots of different ways to innovate it. My colleagues at McMaster whom you just chatted with have looked at different mechanisms in pooling, in robots, in other methodologies to get testing scaled up to a quantification that—

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Sorry, Dr. Chagla, I'll get to this one quickly.

You mentioned something important that I know we're looking at as we are prioritizing the most vulnerable for the vaccine. Would you say that pilots, flight attendants, etc., should be placed in this first group since they have this exposure on a regular basis? Based on your information—I've done the math too. That's like one person every flight, so I see what you're saying.

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

I'd also ask Dr. Bogoch to weigh in here because he also sits on a fairly large provincial vaccine committee.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

I'm aware. Yes.

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

I think from my standpoint, in the NACI recommendations, which are our federal recommendations, there is a recommendation for front-facing individuals like firefighters, teachers, police officers, but not in the first wave of vaccination. That is down the list after health care workers, long-term care residents, vulnerable individuals.