Hon. Marty Deacon: My question is for the Government Representative in the Senate.

Senator Gold, this week is National Hospice Palliative Care Week. New data released from the Canadian Institute for Health Information showed that nearly 200,000 Canadians receive palliative care annually. Sadly, we do not know what qualifies as palliative care as there are no real standards in place. In December 2018, the federal government tabled a Framework on Palliative Care in Canada to work toward clarity in this regard. Recently, Senator Black, Senator Boehm and I spent time with leaders in the Waterloo region to further discuss this framework. The framework requires the federal government to report on the state of palliative care in Canada within five years of its release, meaning that the report is due by the end of 2023.

My question is: Is the government committed to this mandated review to better ensure that Canadians across the country can have access to equal and appropriate palliative care services? If so, when will we see this review?

Hon. Marty Deacon: My question is for the Government Representative in the Senate, and it concerns the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senator Gold, yesterday the Auditor General released two important reports on the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, one on vaccine procurement and the other on COVID-19 benefits. These are two important snapshots of the government response that are part of a much larger picture.

Throughout the pandemic, I often heard that, through no fault of anybody’s, the government’s response to the pandemic was like building an airplane in mid-flight. There are lessons to be learned here that we cannot forget. We need a blueprint for the next big pandemic or whatever the next big thing is.

As we’ve been reminded through the daily work of Justice Rouleau, a commission of inquiry is incredibly effective at working through events in a transparent and systematic way.

Does the government intend to establish a commission of inquiry into the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and if so, when can we expect this to occur?