Health committee  Sorry, I think I was on mute.

Health committee  I'll be very brief. It's a complex issue. I don't think it's properly understood. I'm not sure that CBSA and the government are doing a great service in treating the issue as they are. The question is not just how many people come across the border with a variant that might be

Health committee  This is a great mystery that we have to get to the heart of, and I hope, as Ms. Rempel suggested, that there will really be a serious, across-the-board, lessons-learned exercise. I haven't seen any sign that it's going to take place yet. We've had ad hoc efforts to learn some les

Health committee  I'm happy to go first. Very quickly, in response to the question, the answer is yes, absolutely. I think a variety of measures, including earlier border closure measures, would have been of assistance. Quebec's timing with regard to its March break and the return of snowbirds a

Health committee  Mr. Barlow, that's an excellent question. I suppose it's a rhetorical question, in a way. I would just add one point. PHAC had been in the process of planning a national simulation for a public health emergency for nine years, between 2010 and 2019, and hadn't pulled one off. I t

Health committee  That's a great question. I don't really have an answer for you. I'm very much hoping that the independent panel the health minister has struck to look into this question will get to the bottom of it. Their interim report suggested that they hadn't been able—at that stage, when th

Health committee  Very quickly, I think the key to the responses of the countries that have proved best able to deal with COVID-19 quickly out of the gate—countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Korea—was first of all that they had the capacity to take the threat seriously and unders

Health committee  I'm not aware in detail, Ms. Rempel. I know there have been enormous changes in the senior leadership at PHAC. Clearly, some of those changes in the executive ranks at PHAC were designed very specifically to bring expertise from the security intelligence community into the agency

Health committee  Some obvious candidates—and they'll probably be familiar to many members of the committee—are among our Five Eyes partners. Australia and New Zealand come immediately to mind. That's not necessarily because they had better intelligence capabilities or better structures, but for s

Health committee  Ms. Rempel Garner, thank you for your question. I suppose I should address the chair, but that's always seemed to me a strange formality. My apologies. I think you make an excellent point, but I would say two things in response to the question of what we can do now. One is tha

Health committee  I'm afraid I would have to say that seems to be the case, certainly up to the period in which we have some public documentation on how PHAC handled the emergency. Senior executives in the Public Health Agency of Canada and across the government have to—and I'm sure are now—taking

Health committee  Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for this invitation to appear before the committee in its study of the current health emergency. Many things have gone badly with our preparedness and response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The crucial first thing that went wrong was