Industry committee  No, and in fact, every province doesn't use it. Seven provinces and one territory currently use it. The immunization and vaccine inventory is in seven provinces, plus one territory, which is about 86% of our population of Canada having their immunization data in the database. How

Industry committee  Which one best uses it? For the most extensive use, I would have said British Columbia and they do it in a whole bunch of different ways; the health authorities all implement it quite a bit differently. However, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have outbreak management, as does Nova Sco

Industry committee  I can comment at a high level. I'm not an expert in this space, but I can tell you that, for instance, when we are implementing a system in Canada in particular that is going to deal with public health information, PHI, we have to abide by the provinces' rules and the federal rul

Industry committee  Yes. Again, the type of data is very important in how it's shared. You may want support or people working on your data or working on your project, but they're not within Canada. Then they have to abide by all the privacy and security legislation. We have to make sure they're not

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  That's an excellent question. When you're pulling data together, you want to have one source. The problem is if you have multiple.... For instance, suppose you implement multiple contact tracing solutions, and you're pulling data into multiple databases. When you're asked a ques

Industry committee  For sure. It's integrating it so that you know you're drawing it from only one source and you're not drawing it from multiple sources that might contradict one another or you might not get a full answer, that sort of thing. You want it all in one place.

Industry committee  That is a really good question. I can give you my personal perspective. It's just to give you some statistics out of the U.K. In the U.K., 80% of people have a phone. If you have to get to 80%, it's very, very difficult. I'm optimistic because I think the more contact tracing we

Industry committee  Is that for me again? That's a philosophical question. Certainly IBM doesn't have a position. I think we have to look to our health leaders. I can say that in British Columbia we all do what Dr. Bonnie Henry tells us to do. We're in. We're all in.

Industry committee  Very quickly, yes, Canada is doing a great job. It's easy to be critical and it's important to be critical because we can improve very much. We can do more on the cloud. We can do a lot of digitization. A lot of countries are envious of the position we're in and how we've handled

Industry committee  I can tell you what I'm hearing from other countries and from experts. I can't give a position myself. The general percentages I'm hearing are that it's between 60% and 80% to get an effective coverage. That, I think, is what seems to be in the public.

Industry committee  I would echo Colin's comments. We would obviously support the modernization of it. It's all about trust and transparency, and that's what we have to build. We've seen it in Europe, like you mentioned, with the GDPR. We're supportive of going down that path.

Industry committee  When he says contact tracing, I'm assuming it's proximity tracing that we're talking about, what Mimik was talking about. I think the position we've taken is that it's very much a consent model, much to what Fay said. You as the end-user should have the decision on your data and

Industry committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to speak about IBM and the Canadian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. My name is Eric Johnson, and I am speaking to you today from Vancouver, British Columbia. I am a partner with IB