Madam Speaker, I rise in the House tonight to address Canada's overall plan for preparedness with respect to the H1N1 virus.
Canadians remember all too well the 2003 outbreak of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome. It killed 44 Canadians, made hundreds more sick and paralyzed a major segment of our health care system for weeks. More than 25,000 residents of the Toronto area were placed in quarantine, myself included. The economic effects reverberated across the entire country. The SARS experience brought to a head growing concerns about the capacity of Canada's public health system to anticipate and respond effectively to public health threats.
In May 2003, the former minister of health appointed Dr. David Naylor, then dean of the University of Toronto's school of medicine, to chair a national advisory committee on SARS and public health to look at ways to improve Canada's public health system.
The committee on SARS and public health was established in early May 2003. The committee's mandate was to provide a third party assessment of current public health efforts and lessons learned for ongoing and future infectious disease control. Committee members represented disciplines and perspectives from across Canada. Several were directly involved in responding to SARS in different capacities.
The committee reviewed source documents, conducted interviews and engaged consultants to undertake surveys, additional interviews and analyses to illuminate aspects of the SARS experience. Advice was also sought from a constitutional legal expert. Over 30 non-governmental and voluntary sector stakeholders submitted helpful briefs and letters.
The Naylor report said that dealing successfully with future public health crises would require a truly collaborative framework involving different levels of government with a shared commitment to protecting and promoting the health of all Canadians.
As Dr. Naylor said, Canada's ability to contain an outbreak is only as strong as the weakest judicial jurisdiction in the chain of provincial and territorial public health systems. He said that infectious diseases cannot be addressed in isolation by any one public health entity. All levels of the public health system needed to be reinforced and their components more fully integrated with each other.
Pre-SARS there were no federal transfers earmarked for local and PT public health activities. Public health competed against personal health services for health dollars in provincial budgets, even as the federal government increasingly earmarked its health transfers for personal health services priorities.
The SARS story, as it unfolded in Canada, had both tragic and heroic elements. Although the toll of the epidemic was substantial, thousands in the health field rose to the occasion and ultimately contained the SARS outbreak in this country. It was no small feat. For that, their efforts should be applauded.
Following Dr. Naylor's report, a new federal approach to Canada's public health system took shape based on three pillars: first, creating a chief public health officer, CPHO, for Canada; second, building a pan-Canadian public health network; and third, building a federal public health agency.
In 2004, the Public Health Agency of Canada, PHAC, was created and the Public Health Agency of Canada Act was passed in April 2006.
As the main federal agency responsible for public health, PHAC supports about 2,400 researchers and staff, as well as a wide variety of programs and services offered by both the federal government and non-governmental agencies, NGOs, across Canada.
Long before the conception of PHAC, the federal government was working closely with the World Health Organization and other public health bodies to focus on initiatives to strengthen pandemic influenza preparedness, consisting of five program components. The position of the World Health Organization, WHO, with regard to a pandemic has always been that it is a question of when, not if.
The WHO worked with member countries to produce a global agenda for influenza surveillance and control to prepare for the next influenza pandemic and to coordinate international action in influenza surveillance and control.
The WHO urged all countries to develop or update their own plans for dealing with influenza. In keeping with the WHO global agenda, the federal-provincial-territorial governments in Canada established a pandemic influenza committee that produced the Canadian pandemic influenza plan, CPIP. Among other things, the plan provided a framework to guide the actions of all levels of government for prevention, preparedness and response implementation activities. Provinces and territories used the plan as a framework for developing their own plans.
In addition, in keeping with the plan, we took a number of important steps to strengthen its pandemic readiness. We increased surveillance and monitoring of influenza outbreaks to detect cases and clusters of severe or emerging respiratory infections and to effectively prevent and contain their spread.
Also, national case definitions and standardized laboratory tests and protocols were developed to ensure consistent approaches to diagnosing, managing and reporting cases of severe respiratory infection. An influenza pandemic vaccine contract was put in place to enhance capacity to produce enough doses to meet domestic supply needs based on one dose per person in the event of a pandemic.
A pandemic influenza preparedness strategy aimed at further strengthening Canada's pandemic influenza readiness was recommended. Building on activities identified in the CPIP and outstanding issues, the proposed strategy included: first, development and testing of a mock, for example a prototype vaccine, using the H5N1 virus to test domestic production capacity and enhance regulatory readiness to reduce the time later required to prove a pandemic vaccine; second, federal contribution toward the initial establishment of a national stockpile of antiviral medications; third, new research and development measures to improve Canada's influenza research capacity and to develop rapid vaccine technology for emerging influenza viruses; fourth, emergency preparedness and response measures to improve federal-provincial-territorial capacity to respond to an influenza pandemic through health and social service planning, testing of the CPIP and development of national standards for emergency social service, psychological, social service delivery; and fifth, communications and collaboration activities to engage stakeholders in the development of a national risk communications approach and to strengthen international collaboration.
Budget 2006 provided $1 billion over five years, years 2006 to 2011, to implement this preparedness strategy to respond to the threat of pandemic influenza, including a pandemic contingency fund. This money sought to strengthen federal capacity in seven major areas: vaccines and antivirals, surge capacity, prevention and early warning, emergency preparedness, critical science and regulation, risk communications and federal-provincial-territorial and international collaboration.
PHAC received $384 million over five years to strengthen federal human health capacity to prepare and respond to the threat of avian and pandemic influenza in several areas including: rapid vaccine development capacity and the purchase of antiviral drugs; support to on-reserve first nations communities in the development, testing and revisions of community level influenza pandemic plans; risk communications strategies, including social marketing campaigns; field surge capacity such as the deployment of field epidemiologists and laboratory experts to affected countries and quarantine officers to points of entry; establishment of the national veterinary reserve and Canadian avian influenza vaccine bank; and early warning surveillance in collaboration with the WHO.
In addition, Health Canada received $15.5 million to address the needs of first nations communities with respect to public health emergency planning and for regulatory work, including review readiness and safety monitoring for vaccines and resources for review and approval of antiviral drug submissions for the treatment of pandemic influenza.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the CIHR, also received funding of $21.5 million. This continues to support over 140 pandemic and influenza-related projects that contribute to managing the current influenza outbreak. CIHR continues to examine this research in contribution to the understanding of the H1N1 flu virus and better management of this outbreak.
This funding was a significant investment that showed foresight, leadership and commitment to the health and well-being of all Canadians. It is because of this investment that Canada has been on the leading edge of the global response.
In fact, other countries have commented on how well Canada has been responding, including Dr. Margaret Chan, head of the WHO, who specifically commended Canada for all its efforts. I think Canadians would agree that we are well prepared on each and every level.
In May of this year the health portfolio accessed the 2009-10 contingency fund to support first and second wave activities. The health portfolio used the 2009-10 contingency funding to respond to urgent H1N1 pressures on PHAC, Health Canada and the CFIA and to initiate second wave planning. Thanks to these efforts, Canada is a global leader in pandemic planning and we are implementing the Canadian pandemic influenza plan to reduce the effects of a possible pandemic.
The pandemic plan is the product of an extensive dialogue and collaboration with provincial and territorial public health authorities, health care workers, scientific exports and academics. It is only through this foresight and advanced planning that the health portfolio has been in a position to respond as quickly and effectively as it has to the H1N1 virus.
I want to give the House an update. At the end of the first week of the largest mass immunization campaign in Canadian history, the Government of Canada supplied the following amounts of H1N1 adjuvanted vaccine doses to the provinces: in Ontario, 2,229,000 doses; in Quebec, 1,331,000 doses; in British Columbia, 818,000 doses; in Alberta, 622,000 doses; in Manitoba, 206,000 doses; in Saskatchewan, 173,000 doses; in New Brunswick, 129,000 doses; in Newfoundland and Labrador, 86,000 doses; in Nova Scotia, 160,000 doses—
