Health committee  I can't speak to the worldwide situation. I can say that most public health institutes worldwide have public health doctors or public health professionals in charge. I agree that there is a move to more bureaucratic...or non-experts. I think, in part, it's because the advice of

Health committee  It is not why I left PHAC. I loved working at the Public Health Agency of Canada. There are so many amazing public health professionals there, but I had a sense of calling and wanted to exercise some of my public health skills at a very local level, in a parish.

Health committee  I think best practice for emergency preparedness, universally, is that you exercise. You practice and practice, and then, when the earthquake happens, you are basically running on muscle memory. In general, we can say that exercising those pandemic plans, and practising, would ha

Health committee  Yes. We knew it was coming. The challenge with public health is that it has a massive scope, from opioids to pandemics. It's really tough to focus on things that don't have an immediate payoff, and we're seeing the consequence now.

Health committee  The challenge of public health is that our political benefit is to respond to something rather than to prevent, and I think that's the question of inertia. If we had prevented all the cases of COVID, people would ask why we were making such a big deal about it. Before things get

Health committee  I'm here speaking as an individual and not as a representative of the Anglican Church of Canada. As an individual, I think anything we can do to ensure that vaccines are distributed with equity and with rapidity is in line with the moral teachings of the church, so I think we wa

Health committee  The Public Health Agency, as originally constituted, was set up to manage the pandemic. You need to remember that the Public Health Agency of Canada was set up because of a coronavirus outbreak. It's the changes that have come, with the diminishment of science and the diminishmen

Health committee  As someone who's not on the inside, it's hard to give a specific example of that, but I can suggest that GPHIN provides a nice example. You have a group of people who are in charge of GPHIN but don't understand that you have to keep looking for the pandemic, and the fact that you

Health committee  You need bureaucrats. You need communications experts to help the public health professionals. Regarding that group at NACI, what they're saying needed to be run through with some communications people and tested and thought through. I know where they're coming from, but they're

Health committee  In the movement in the 2014 revision to the Public Health Agency of Canada Act, where you had a bureaucrat put in charge of this organization, that's the key. The bureaucrat needs to support the CPHO, but ultimately a trained medical professional—a public health doctor or a publi

Health committee  Do you mean in the federal government or on the ground?

Health committee  Yes, we need more public health expertise: doctors, nurses, epidemiologists who are not subordinate but are actually the ones with the decision-making power, who are supported by the bureaucracy. That's where we've gone wrong.

Health committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me here today to speak with you. My name is Michael Garner. I am an Anglican priest and an infectious disease epidemiologist. I worked at the Public Health Agency of Canada from 2006 to 201