- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
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- Beaches—East York
- Ontario
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moved that Bill C-293, An Act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
He said: Mr. Speaker, as of today, we have lost over 45,000 Canadians to COVID, and millions of people around the world have died as a result of COVID. It has upended our lives in so many different ways, from isolation to school closures. It has upended businesses and caused major economic disruptions, reverberations that we still feel with difficult inflation and interest rate hikes that are challenging many households. The global impact on poverty rates and the upending of education around the world will have long-lasting and negative effects.
There was the increasing debt that governments around the world rightly took on to address this crisis in many respects. Both public and private debt also come with consequences. Fifty-seven per cent of Canadians whose debt increased attributed the increase to COVID. As a parliamentary intern in my office put it, even having just lived it first-hand, it is hard to wrap our heads around what we just experienced.
What can and should we do about all of that? What lessons should we learn? We have to be specific and clear, and put a framework in place to make sure we do not lose these lessons. Simply put, the message of this bill is that we need to learn the lessons from this pandemic in order to prevent and prepare for the next one. No, we are not done with COVID, but we have also lived through enough to learn from our pandemic response across all levels of government, and those lessons should inform our plans going forward.
What does the pandemic prevention and preparedness bill do? It does three things. First, it establishes a review of our COVID response, not just from the federal government's perspective but across all levels of government. The goal is to be comprehensive. Just to comment briefly on the scope of the review, the bill notes:
In conducting its review, the advisory committee is, among other things, to
(a) assess the capability of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Department of Health to respond to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic before and during the pandemic;
(b) in collaboration with provincial and municipal governments, assess the public health and pandemic response capabilities of those governments;
(c) assess the effectiveness of the exercise of powers under any applicable federal laws before, during and after the pandemic and of the coordination of measures taken under those laws; and
Importantly, and this is the broad element to bring to bear on lessons learned:
(d) analyse the health, economic and social factors relevant to the impact of the pandemic in Canada.
There has to be a review if we are going to learn the lessons of our government's response and the response of all governments.
How do we take those lessons and put them into a framework where we are going to see accountability, transparency and action on a going-forward basis? The second thing the bill does is it requires the Minister of Health to establish a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan. It is modelled on climate accountability legislation.
To my knowledge the first piece of climate accountability legislation that I reviewed was from a Conservative government in the U.K. in 2006, and we now have such a framework in place here in Canada. This bill takes a similar approach to say there has to be a transparent and accountable framework by which a government is obligated to table a plan to Parliament, to the Canadian public, and then update that plan on a regular basis. The bill suggests every three years. I went back and forth between three and five years. I think five years would be appropriate as well.
It obligates the Minister of the Health to establish a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan and to table a report. The bill sets out a long list of factors. This is where it was quite difficult actually, because I was drawing from a great amount of expertise out there, from the United Nations Environment Programme's report on preventing future pandemics, from IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and their workshop reports in relation to pandemic risk and how we prevent future pandemics, and certainly from the independent panel. It has a series of reports now on preparedness and response at the national level and also at the global level, and how we could strengthen those responses at all levels.
Taking those expert reports, and in consultation with some of the researchers behind those reports and certainly with Canadian health experts as well, the bill sets out a series of factors that the Minister of Health must consider in developing a plan. I am sure I missed some elements, which is partly why it is so important to get a bill like this to committee. The committee could, I hope in a non-partisan way, say what does not make sense or whether something was missed or how we could get it to the best place possible as a matter of what should be in or out of a plan as the health minister considers it.
As a starting point, obviously enough, what the health minister should do is identify the key drivers of pandemic risk and describe how Canadian activities, domestic and abroad, contribute to the risk.
We focus a lot in this House and, frankly, in the Canadian public around preparedness strategies, and that is part of what this bill would do as well. We do not talk enough about prevention, but we know that the costs of prevention are a small fraction of the significant human and economic costs of living through a pandemic. Therefore, there has to be a real strong focus on prevention.
There also has to be a commitment to ensure collaboration at all levels of government, because it is not enough in our federation for the federal government to take action on its own. Similar to climate action, and certainly with respect to mitigating pandemic risk and to preparing for pandemics, it cannot all be on the federal government, and we have learned that. It is unquestionably a lesson we have learned in the course of the response to COVID. Therefore, the bill would require the Minister of Health to ensure sustained collaboration between the Minister of Health, provincial governments and indigenous communities in the development of the plan, in order to align approaches and address any jurisdictional challenges.
Now, I probably could have been a little clearer with the language here, but the bill would also provide for training programs, including collaborative activities with other levels of government. What I had in mind there, and I think a committee could improve this, was simulation and table-talking exercises. It is not enough to have a piece of paper with a plan written down. We have to put that plan into action and learn where there are gaps in the plan. Where jurisdictional challenges arise, they can be addressed through a simulation exercise rather than as we live through a real-life pandemic.
Now, a critical element here, when we draw from the literature, is that the plan has to be based on a “one health” approach. For those who do not know what a “one health” approach is, it is a relatively simple idea, although it can be a challenge sometimes in how we apply it, because of how holistic it is. It is this idea that we cannot pull apart human health, animal health and environmental health, that these are interconnected ideas and we have to think of them as one health.
We know this, and if we read the literature from the United Nations Environment Programme, from IPBES or from any number of experts, including Canadian experts in zoonotic diseases, they will tell us that zoonosis presents the greatest risk in relation to pandemics. Taking deforestation as an example, the spillover risk that can occur when humans are obviously going to come into closer contact with animals as a result of that deforestation creates not only a challenge to the environment, as it is a question of environmental health, but also then a question of human health, because of that spillover risk. When we run down a list of factors, and there are different reports on this, overwhelmingly the focus has to be on a “one health” approach.
I will read from the United Nations Environment Programme, which states:
This report confirms and builds on the conclusions of the FAO-OIE-WHO Tripartite Alliance and many other expert groups that a One Health approach is the optimal method for preventing as well as responding to zoonotic disease outbreaks and pandemics.
Therefore, there has to be a focus on a “one health” approach.
There also, of course, has to be a whole-of-government approach. It is not enough for the Minister of Health to work up a plan. The Minister of Health has to work with other ministers, break down silos in the federal government and ensure that we are putting ourselves on the best footing we possibly can to prevent and respond to future pandemics. The Minister of Industry has a role to play in terms of ensuring that we have vaccine manufacturing capacity and manufacturing capacity for essential treatments and tests. There is a role for the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Transport to play with respect to border controls. There is obviously a role for the Minister of Foreign Affairs to play with respect to global health equity, which is an issue that, unfortunately, we have, as wealthier countries, utterly failed on in a serious way in the course of this pandemic. There also ought to be collaboration, and this is in keeping with that idea of a “one health” approach, with the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Environment.
Therefore, if we think of a framework that already exists within the Government of Canada, a “one health” approach with respect to antimicrobial resistance, it is a partnership between the Department and the Minister of Health and the Department and the Minister of Agriculture, because we know, certainly in other countries around the world, that the increase and overuse of antibiotics can create the risk of superbugs. There are researchers at McMaster who call it the “silent pandemic”, referring to the number of lives that have already been taken by AMR. As I have said, it is a whole-of-government approach.
I will say that this has to be a focus of the committee when it looks at the series of factors, ensuring that it gets sustained collaboration with the provinces, because we need to make sure, for example, that there are preparedness strategies for public health services, including the protection of vulnerable and marginalized populations. That will be as much a provincial question as it is a federal question. The working conditions of essential workers across all sectors is as much a provincial issue as it is a federal issue.
The availability management of relevant stockpiles, including testing equipment and PPE, is more of a federal issue, but we have seen challenges at times at the provincial level as well.
There is the search capacity of the human resources required for testing and contact tracing, because we cannot have the human resources at the ready at all times. We need to be able to stand them up to meet the surge, and again the provinces and the federal government will need to work hand in hand on this.
There are a series of other factors, and I will not go into all of them. I want to mention the seven key disease drivers identified by the United Nations Environment Programme.
First is an increasing demand for animal protein, because we understand the spillover risk and lack of biosecurity, especially with increased demand in low and middle-income countries. It is a real challenge that needs to be addressed.
Second is unsustainable agricultural intensification.
Third is the increased use and exploitation of wildlife. If we look at the live animal markets around the world, they have presented challenges, including likely in the course of the crisis we have just lived through.
Fourth is the unsustainable utilization of natural resources, accelerated by urbanization and land-use change.
Fifth is travel and transportation.
Sixth is changes in the food supply chains. Traceability challenges are the issue there.
Seventh is climate change.
These are major twin risks. Climate change is an existential risk in and of itself, but it also drives pandemic risk. That is not to say we can eliminate travel, and we are not going to eliminate agriculture, but how do we look at these industries to find best efforts to reduce and mitigate pandemic risk to prevent a future pandemic? How do we make sure there are regulations in place so we can prepare for future pandemics as well?
I suppose the last item that I want to close off with is that there needs to be accountability in any particular role here.
One, the bill establishes a review, the lessons learned.
Two, it requires some detail about what ought to be in that plan. I have gone into this in some detail, and there is greater detail in the bill. I hope it can be a collaborative exercise at committee, because I want this to be a non-partisan exercise in getting it right.
Three, we need to make sure that we appoint a national pandemic prevention and preparedness coordinator to oversee and implement the plans, so there is proper accountability and an office for seeing this through.
Lastly, I want to close with this idea, because I think it is a relevant one. We forget crises in politics. We deal with them and then forget about them. Over time we saw this with SARS. We cannot go through another situation where 20 years from now we look back at a debate like this one or a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan that we developed in the year 2022 or 2023 that has been sitting on a shelf and has not been updated or implemented. The idea here, very much as a matter of accountability, is to ensure that all future governments, regardless of political stripe, take this seriously, renew their focus on pandemic prevention and preparedness, and make sure we do not lose sight of the lessons learned and do not live through something like this ever again as a society. I cannot overemphasize this: The costs of a pandemic like the one we have just lived through are so incredibly significant, and the costs of prevention and preparedness are a very small fraction of that.
I hope there is all-party support for getting this to committee to improve it, to bring amendments to it and to see it through.
I appreciate being given this time today.
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