Health committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to brief you on how COVID-19 has revealed that the system to protect Canadian health workers during a public health emergency is broken, and must be fixed urgently before the expected second pa

Health committee  That's a very good question. During SARS, there was some work on temperature screening, but it was inconclusive, and the information was that it appeared to be ineffective. This occurred over a short period of time. The equipment at the time was not as effective as it is today, s

Health committee  You know, I'm not an expert in this area, so I don't want to speak on it. I do think the whole issue of border control is one that needs to be controlled in depth. What's the best way to do that? What's the best way to monitor movement? Is it the technology, as mentioned by the w

Health committee  That's a really great question. Dr. Osterholm of the University of Minnesota has raised this issue. He is in fact working on a plan to be able to create, for the public, masks that are as protective as N95s. I think that should be our goal. I think everyone should be protected, i

Health committee  That's a great question. I think one of the problems is that PHAC and other public health agencies in Canada, and the WHO as well, don't have the kind of diverse knowledge and expertise that we need. They have very good knowledge in terms of epidemiology, but they really need to

Health committee  I presume you're asking about the personal protective measures for health care workers. Is that correct?

Health committee  They're not, and I believe the data showing that one in five of the COVID-19 cases in Canada involves health care workers demonstrates that point. I think we urgently need to take a precautionary approach and protect our health care workers across the country to the highest level

Health committee  We have enough time if we act urgently. One of the really disappointing things thus far from the federal government and PHAC is that we have not acted urgently to ensure we had enough PPE. For example, in late December, Alberta bought a huge quantity of N95 respirators. PHAC an

Health committee  She never replied to my letter.

Health committee  It is. We had opportunities over and over, especially in the beginning and late December, when we had the first inkling that something very serious was happening in Wuhan. We had the opportunity to act boldly and quickly to protect our health care workers and, by extension, to p

Health committee  I'll tell you personally that I'm gutted that it has happened, that things have gone the way they have here. This has gone far worse than my worst nightmare, and one of the reasons is that PHAC does not understand the role of unions and workers in worker safety. In any workplace,

Health committee  I think PHAC has been slow to the game, and public masking is a great example. Early on I wrote a letter to Dr. Tam saying that concerns about self-contamination are warranted, but if that's the case, you should have an urgent, wide public health campaign—as they do in Singapore,

Health committee  That's a great question. It's one that I've wondered about. What I've seen is that PHAC's advice has been in lockstep with the WHO right from the word go. There has not been any critical thinking, any critical evaluation, on whether that's the right advice. I'll give you another

Health committee  You know, when Justice Campbell gave the advice on setting up PHAC and Dr. Tam's office, he felt, and I agreed with him, that we had it covered, because it gave that office the independent ability to speak out on health risks. We thought that if there was a shortage of masks, the

Health committee  First of all, I think we need to move to the precautionary principle in protecting them. We need to go to airborne precautions. As we now move, as the government has said, to domestic production of N95s, we should really ramp that up to make sure we have enough supplies to do tha