Health committee  Yes. We support, of course, an overarching federal-provincial-territorial committee that is looking at mental health, substance use or addiction. Our focus, absolutely, is to try to get that data. The Public Health Agency continues to even put public health offices inside jurisdi

Health committee  I think prevention is perhaps one area that everybody would agree on. I think that agnostic of the type of substance, youth will access the whole range of psychoactive substances, from alcohol to cannabis to, indeed, potentially opioids. I think the root cause of some of the reas

Health committee  I think the data or facts about this crisis show that right now it is the extremely toxic illegal supply that is causing the most harm. I think that's one factor everyone should bear in mind. Some of the application of the range of measures is because of that. Right now I work v

Health committee  Thank you for this timely question. I think we are absolutely in a better spot, of course, than we were even a year ago, despite the arrival of the omicron virus. I think what one would say is that we are carefully monitoring the situation. We will indicate what we know as we go

Health committee  This is a really important point, and one on which public health needs to do a better job. Describing what did not happen and what is prevented is not an easy task. The Public Health Agency scientists did provide a publication recently on what we call “counterfactual scenarios”

Health committee  We do maintain close communication with the United States and, no, I'm certainly not responsible for the ArriveCAN application itself. We can refer you to our colleagues at CBSA, but our VP—

Health committee  —who is in charge of borders is on our panel today if we need to refer to her. Let me just remind you that the United States had three times the human deaths per 100,000 population than Canada, so we did do things differently, and have been doing things differently. Our outcome

Health committee  This is really important, and this is why we must come together, work together, to earn that trust and keep it up. The outcome for Canada has been relatively good, but I—

Health committee  Between myself and my other chief medical officers, we have regular interactions. They voiced the fact that, while we're in the same pandemic, everyone is in a different context. We do work with similar data, so mask use, for example, is very important if the mask is properly con

Health committee  Mr. Chair, I thank the member for the question. Of course, to add to my previous answers, we've been looking at lessons learned throughout the pandemic and evolving our response as we go along. We had OAG audits. We've been responding to those as well. We've also had external ex

Health committee  As I said, that decision is not up to me. However, as I reiterated before, lessons learned are very important, with the view to improving our response going forward.

Health committee  Given the nature of a pandemic and the complex public health challenges, there has to be a huge amount of collaboration between provinces, territories and the federal government. No level of government can do this alone. In terms of the health care system pressures, on the publi

Health committee  Mr. Chair, I'll start. Thank you to the member for those questions. Part of my reflection on lessons learned is that hindsight is 20/20. Information and the evolution of the understanding of the virus are changing all the time. At that point in time, at the end of January, we w

Health committee  Yes, trust is really important. I am not a politician, as you rightly pointed out. Because we're dealing with extremely complex decisions, it is ultimately the political decision-makers who make those decisions. We provide both technical information to them and, of course, commun

Health committee  Mr. Chair, I want to thank the member for that question. My colleague, Mr. Stephen Bent, vice-president of the vaccine rollout task force, can supplement my answer. My previous response describes some of our seven-point immunization action plan, which aims to boost the confidenc