Federal Health Committee Agrees COVID Review Cannot Be Gov’t-Controlled

A man stands in front of the Nordstrom store, closed for in-store shopping in downtown Toronto, on Nov. 23, 2020. Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images

A government health committee has agreed that the Liberal government cannot review its own response to COVID-19.

MPs on the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health decided at their April 20 meeting that Liberal bill C-293, An Act Respecting Pandemic Prevention, needs to be revised.

The bill would give the health minister power to “establish an advisory committee” to review the government’s COVID management over a two-year period. It would also require the minister to establish, “in consultation with other ministers, a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan.”

Blacklock’s Reporter reported that MPs on the committee endorsed the drafting of a preparedness plan but rejected the internal review as self-serving for cabinet.

B.C. New Democrat MP Don Davies said the internal review was self-serving.

“It’s not independent, it’s not transparent,” said Davies, adding that it “would constitute a whitewash.”

“This bill would have the Minister of Health who is in charge of the Public Health Agency appoint an advisory committee, not even an independent committee with any real powers, but an advisory committee to assess his or her performance and the performance of the Agency,” added Davies.

He likened it to “the defendant appointing the judge.”

“It’s completely unacceptable on its own,” he said. “The NDP has wanted the federal government to launch an independent public inquiry under the Inquiries Act from the beginning.”

Ontario Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, who sponsored the bill, said, “Delete that section.”

“Get the review question just out of the way,” he said. “If it is causing consternation across the aisle, just get rid of it.”

Bloc Québécois MP Luc Thériault said, “It would take an independent public inquiry to establish exactly where we failed, not so we can point the finger but so we have an overview of everything that is now in place.”

He also asked, “Why is it everything in place was insufficient to prepare us properly for a pandemic?”

Planning Guide

In September 2004, Parliament formed the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to serve as a pandemic preparedness unit, in part as a response to the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed 44 Canadians.

In 2006, PHAC adopted a Canadian pandemic influenza preparedness planning guidance document for the health sector, an evergreen document to be updated as required. The expectation at the time was that another pandemic was inevitable. By 2019, the agency was fully funded at a $675 million a year.

Audits have since found that PHAC was poorly prepared for COVID-19. It did not maintain an emergency stockpile of medical supplies, had “limited public health expertise,” and lacked a “clear understanding” of how to collect critical data.

Following shortages of goods like medical gowns, political aides in the Prime Minister’s Office shared a 2020 email that suggested nurses “explore fallbacks should everything else be insufficient, for example heavy duty garbage bags.”

Alberta Conservative MP Laila Goodridge said, “You can have an absolutely stunningly brilliant plan, but if you don’t actually follow it, what is the point?”

She said the government needs to have “an open, public inquiry into this so we can actually look at what happened, when, what worked, what didn’t.”