(Ottawa) Federal Liberals are creating a new agency to strengthen Canada’s ability to fight fast-spreading infectious diseases and protect against future pandemics.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the agency is intended to preserve the “high-level team” of public servants who helped Canadians through COVID-19.
The Health Crisis Preparedness Canada organization will be responsible for boosting Canada’s life sciences sector and ensuring Canadians have faster access to vaccines, medical therapies and diagnostics by accelerating the transition from research to commercialization.
“The danger would have been that if we didn’t have a permanent agency somewhere, the collective knowledge that we have accumulated during COVID-19 would eventually be dispersed, perhaps even lost within the public service,” Champagne told reporters on Tuesday.
“We bring them together as a team so that when people talk about health, emergency preparedness, they know where to turn.”
The new agency will be based in the Department of Industry, but will include staff from the Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada. Champagne said it requires no new legislation and is based on spending already approved by Parliament in this year’s budget.
“We want to maintain a very close link with the industry,” said Mr. Champagne.
The agency will coordinate efforts between Canadian industry and university researchers, as well as with international partners.
The move follows a similar move by the European Union, which in 2021 created an agency tasked not only with preparing the continent for pandemics, but also with learning from mistakes made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Canada was not adequately prepared to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The stockpile of emergency equipment was outdated and insufficient, and the vaccine production industry was virtually non-existent.
Last year, the British Medical Journal denounced Canada’s “major pandemic failures,” such as jurisdictional disputes and a high death rate in long-term care facilities.
Yet the Trudeau government has resisted calls from medical experts and the New Democratic Party to follow the lead of countries like the United Kingdom by holding an inquiry into how governments handled the COVID-19 pandemic and how they might better handle a future pandemic.
Asked about the investigation, Champagne said the announcement was aimed at having the right equipment and researchers on hand if needed.
“We all hope there won’t be another pandemic. But the responsible thing to do is to make sure the team is ready to respond,” he said.
Champagne told a biotech industry meeting Friday that officials found Canada was not prepared to coordinate “health emergency preparedness” when its peers began preparing for future events.
“We realized things were scattered,” he said.
He said Canada faced the danger of being the only G7 country “without a dedicated team” for pandemic preparedness.
Once fully operational, the agency will have an “industrial game plan” to move quickly with research and industrial mobilization if another health emergency such as a pandemic is declared.
Mr. Champagne argued that the pandemic and investments in personalized medicine have made the public enthusiastic about the biotech sector.
“If there’s one industry that I think Canadians have fallen in love with again, it’s definitely this industry,” he said.