Health committee  I would like to answer, because my name was used and a comment was made.

Health committee  Sure, Mr. Chair, but I did hear a comment addressed to me. If my name is going to be used, I do feel the need to respond.

Health committee  Thank you. My advice is going to be let's not try to be dishonest about the past. It has not been a priority of any Canadian government—and I say this equally of Conservative or Liberal governments—to prepare for pandemics. After SARS, we had a very clear warning and we had a na

Health committee  —mandate letters mention pandemic preparedness at all.

Health committee  Well, yes. First, here is the good news: We probably have, as a country, crested on the number of infections. That is something our model presents, the one that I sought to place before the committee today. But that doesn't mean we're over it. As I said, this is a very long pr

Health committee  Oh, goodness, no. The chief science adviser of Canada is Dr. Mona Nemer. She has been almost completely missing in action. I think probably most members of the committee don't even know that Canada has a chief science adviser, but it does. If you look at her website, the last st

Health committee  Sure. My comments are in the context of the strategy I presented, which is that the only way to go forward from here is to carve one giant wave that will just bury us into a number of wavelets that are much smaller. That's what we're going to have to do as a country. What Dr. Ta

Health committee  Doctor, thank you for your question. I'll be blunt with you back. That agreement should be torn up and replaced with a law, because it's a voluntary agreement that took a million years to negotiate after SARS. I don't agree with your point of view that this is a unique situatio

Health committee  Doctor, thanks for the question. You're referring to a study that we released last week with my Ph.D. student Brieanne Olibris. As you know, each of the 10 provinces has a self-assessment tool on its health website, which basically asks Canadians, “Do you have a fever? Do you h

Health committee  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am honoured to have received your invitation. Thank you. Like you, I am a Canadian who wishes to get our country out from under COVID-19. I come at this as a professor of both public health and law at the University of Ottawa. I learned

Health committee  Very quickly....

Health committee  I agree with everything that has been said. I think the statement that there's a secure constitutional footing is a little too optimistic.

Health committee  As I said earlier, I think if the different provincial buyers came together under a federal umbrella and aggregated their needs, then you would have the maximum economic leverage. You would have what economists call a monopsony situation to procure drugs at the best price followi

Health committee  That's one way to do exactly what you said. The other way to achieve exactly the same outcome is through the series of contracts that I mentioned. Both are equally possible goals to get to where you want to go.

Health committee  I think it would change it. I'm certainly not meaning to say that if you removed many functions of medicine purchasing from provincial hands and placed them in federal hands, automatically the birds will sing, the sun will shine, and people who are ill will spring out of their be