Michael Wolfson

QUOI Media

Recent outrage by some members of Parliament about an alleged secret collection of Canadians’ data by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) illustrates how misguided many are about the various kinds of personal data — and how they should and should not be used.

Broadly speaking, we should differentiate between two kinds of data that can be collected about people. One is individually identifiable data: In the area of health care, these data typically contain sensitive information — including our names and medical conditions — that we would not want anyone except our health care providers to see.

The other kind of data that pertains to people is known as grouped, or aggregated, data. For example, the number of individuals admitted to hospital who are infected with COVID-19. This kind of data is essential for governments to plan for and provide quality essential services to Canadians.

A second key distinction is how individual data and grouped data should be used. It is vitally important to distinguish “public good” uses from private-sector and commercial uses. Until about a decade ago, private-sector uses were well below the radar, since the means to gather huge amounts of personal data were far more limited. However, with the dramatic growth of big tech firms, along with the dramatic penetration of smartphones into our personal lives, the private sector has become a giant player in collecting and using sensitive, individually-identifiable data.

The problem with the recent loud squawks and ill-informed claims attempting to connect PHAC’s use of cellphone data to an infringement of Canadians’ privacy is that it fails to grasp these distinctions.

One of the most important public health interventions over the past two years in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic has been the encouragement of physical distancing — if two people are not near each other, the virus cannot spread. An obvious way to monitor how well this is working is to check mobility patterns, such as seeing how often people are staying at home and whether areas with more crowding have higher rates of infection.

Collecting this kind of data would have been virtually impossible 10 years ago, but with modern smartphones, mobile-service providers can observe the nearest cell tower for each phone on their network. It is quite easy for them to determine what percentage of each day a phone is near a single tower. Using this information, they can produce aggregated data for a series of neighbourhoods, generate statistics and then determine, for example, the proportion of cellphones that were in their ‘usual place of residence’ for most of the day — or places that appear more crowded and have a likelihood of higher infection rates.

Even if there were low limits on the radius of the locations assessed — covering, say, at least 20 phones — there is no way the data could be used to identify any unique individual, since they would be aggregated.

These are the kinds of aggregated phone data provided to PHAC, and they have been vital for informing government policies how to best target shutdowns and other physical distancing measures to fight the pandemic while minimizing the inevitable harms for businesses and individuals.

These data do not invade anyone’s privacy.

However, the ways in which telcos and big tech firms are collecting and using individually identifiable data is another story.

The kinds of information routinely collected via the use of smartphone apps and social media sites, for example, are being collected lawfully, with “consent,” and often for good and useful purposes. But does anyone really check the legalese in the fine print of these consent statements before clicking “accept” so that they can thoroughly understand how their data will be used?

The outrage over PHAC and data collection highlights a major issue in Canada. On the one hand, we do not really know how all of the data collected by private-sector firms are being used. On the other, unwarranted privacy fears risk hobbling all sorts of highly important and positive public uses of data.

While the risk of reidentification of individuals from aggregated data may be vanishingly small, it would be helpful to add privacy protections to the criminal code to make it an offence for anyone, intentionally or maliciously, to reidentify any individual.

Equally important would be for Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, assuming his detailed investigation does not uncover anything more than is already public, to state very clearly that PHAC did not invade anyone’s privacy and that the use of these data was clearly for the public good.

Stronger regulation of big tech firms – at the very least, insisting on greater transparency about their data collection and use — remains important, but must be distinguished as another matter entirely.

Michael Wolfson is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada and current member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics.

By Jeremy Carver and Michel Chrétien

Canada has welcomed antivirals as a new weapon in the fight to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and alleviate the overcrowding of our hospitals and intensive-care units (ICU). Health Canada’s approval of Pfizer’s antiviral, Paxlovid, has evoked an enthusiastic response from many politicians, physicians and journalists. This endorsement of the key role for antivirals is long overdue.

In the rush to acquire vaccines, Canada overlooked the need to simultaneously create an antiviral development strategy. We need to make up for lost time.

It’s imperative that our federal government create a robust, sustainable, organization dedicated to delivering more antivirals as part of our commitment to improving the global response to pandemics.

Antivirals are essential to ending this pandemic and getting Canada back on a path of new normalcy. To avoid the emergence of drug-resistant SARS-CoV-2, many more antivirals will be needed.

When AZT was first approved in 1987 as a treatment for HIV, it was the only drug available. Now, thirty-five years later, there are more than 30 treatments available, and in the right combinations, drug resistance can be avoided, and symptoms managed.

Another public health benefit of antivirals is that the treatment of infected individuals at the time of diagnosis can lower their viral load and reduce transmission to immediate contacts. This has been shown with triple therapy for HIV and Tamiflu for influenza. Antiviral treatment also reduces the severity of symptoms, benefiting the patient, reducing time in hospital or ICUs, and saving the health care system added costs.

We also need treatments for the surviving patients who are experiencing long-COVID symptoms, such as chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, cardio-pulmonary sequelae, renal failure, anxiety or depression.

What form should Canada’s antiviral initiative take?

To discover and develop more antivirals will require funding on the same aggressive scale that was used for the acquisition of vaccines.

As a start, Canada has recently committed $18.5 million annually to create a “Centre for Research on Pandemic Preparedness and Health Emergencies.” The Research Centre’s mission is broad, and while it includes developing and mobilizing research for pandemic response, it will not be able to deliver the antiviral therapies essential to a robust pandemic response.

How could this be expanded to be successful?

We believe, that in addition to this Centre, Canada should create a highly focused new entity – a global collaboration for antiviral discovery and development. The mission of the new collaboration should be to establish a not-for-profit antiviral drug development pathway for academic discoveries — all the way to patients.

We suggest that such a collaboration be made up of two parts: a focused research organization (FRO) dedicated to antiviral development, embedded in a new academic Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) focused on antiviral discovery. Canada should urgently launch a competition for the new NCE that could bring together the medicinal chemists, structural biologists, pharmacologists and virologists that will be needed to discover new antiviral drug candidates.

The new collaboration would work in partnership with existing Canadian facilities, such as the pre-clinical testing capability at the National Microbiology Laboratory level 3 and 4 biosafety labs or the new National Research Council manufacturing facilities in Montreal. Any collaboration agreements between these entities, or others, should follow open-science protocols.

Canadian scientists and institutions would then be able to participate meaningfully in the billion-dollar philanthropic efforts represented by the World Health Organization’s therapeutics pillar of ACT-A. Such a collaboration with low-and-middle income countries, would foster global efforts for better pandemic preparedness and response.

One illustrative attempt to discover new COVID treatments has been nicknamed the “COVID Moonshot.” It is an international collaborative effort to discover potential therapeutics that was kick-started through Twitter.

Even though this collaboration has rapidly succeeded in finding drug candidates, the “Moonshot” founders note that they are now at the “hard slog” stage – the need for capital to conduct numerous regulated trials, and the subsequent manufacturing and distribution of antivirals globally once they are approved by the regulatory authorities.

For too long the global community has assumed that the pharmaceutical industry will do the “hard slog” and has resigned itself to paying the exorbitant prices that follow. The experience of the Moonshot group emphasizes the need for a not-for-profit pathway for the development of treatments derived from academic collaborations.

A global collaboration for antiviral discovery and development would be a pioneering initiative that Canada is well positioned to lead.

Jeremy Carver PhD is an Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, and President, CEO and co-founder of the not-for-profit International Consortium on Anti-Virals/Consortium International sur les Thérapies Antivirals

Michel Chrétien, FRS, MD is Professeur Émérite de recherche, Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal and a co-founder of the not-for-profit International Consortium on Anti-Virals/ Consortium International sur les Thérapies Antivirals.

 

Narinder Dhami

QUOI Media

Diversity is the brand of Canada. Also in Canada, nearly ninety per cent of venture capital investment deals are directed to companies founded exclusively by men. Black charities receive as little as seven cents for every hundred dollars donated to Canada’s big charities. Indigenous organizations receive just over one-half of a per cent of charitable donations in Canada.

 

Eighty-five per cent of money invested in Canadian venture capital funds goes to funds with no female partners. And less than three per cent of venture capital is invested in women founders, with nominal investments in women of colour. Canadian Foundations that invest in impact investing, invest almost exclusively in white or male fund managers.

 

We often think of being good or bad as binary and static. As Canadians, our attachment to being good people risks our ability to be better.

 

Despite the conversations on equity and diversity, there are growing inequalities in capital flows — amplified through the impacts of COVID-19 — that threaten economic growth and social cohesion. From philanthropy to impact investing to venture capital, communities with diversity across gender, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, geographically, among others, lack access to capital.

 

When it comes to addressing capital flows, action towards equity is fragmented, siloed and slow, while displays of commitment to change are rapid and abundant.

 

Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri reflected on the composition of the audience at his recent Giants of Africa gathering. He noted that had George Floyd been murdered a week ago, the room would look different. Making meaningful change is not accomplished in a moment. It requires a movement and a sustained commitment.

 

We can move beyond a scarcity mindset which makes us believe that we do not have enough money to invest in diverse leaders and founders. This mindset amplifies that one investment we made in a diverse founder or fund while ignoring our broader portfolio. It leaves those with the least power without access to capital.

 

We can collect disaggregated data to know our baseline, set targets and build accountability systems to help make capital more inclusive.

 

We can approach increasing capital to underrepresented communities as a business problem, mobilizing the appropriate resources and capacity to solve it. Building a competitive and economically prosperous Canada is accelerated when we tap into the vast talent across all of our communities. When capital flows are limited due to risk perception, networks and systems, we miss out on this opportunity.

 

Through collaborative research, shared resources and increased transparency, we can accelerate access to capital to those excluded. We can advance inclusive approaches to increase social and economic prosperity for all by flipping orthodoxies, challenging the status quo and investing in undervalued founders, managers and leaders.

 

Equitable capital flows will not be achieved through diversity days. Just as a single workout does not result in rapid health transformation, meaningful progress toward equity requires sustained action.

Narinder Dhami is the Executive Lead of New Power Labs.

Linda Silas

QUOI Media

After close to two years on the front lines of this pandemic, nurses are feeling tapped-out, exasperated and dispirited.

Understaffing has plagued our healthcare system for more than a decade, but COVID-19 has only made it worse. Years of government neglect have created untenable working conditions, with acute levels of stress wreaking havoc on nurses’ mental health.

One nurse described the weight of not being able to provide the care patients deserve as “crushing.” Another nurse told us she was leaving the profession – a profession she used to love – because “no help is coming and no one seems to care.”

It’s no wonder so many nurses are looking for the exit sign.

Job vacancies in healthcare and social assistance soared over the summer, representing one in seven openings in Canada – the largest increase of any sector. Openings for registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses saw the largest increase of all occupations.

Recently, the Ontario Science Table found rates of severe burnout above 60 per cent among Canadian physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals – a drastic jump from the equally alarming 30 to 40 per cent prevalence rate affecting the sector just a year before. 

Nurses and their co-workers are beyond the point of exhaustion and exasperated at the inaction of politicians.

If we want to retain nurses and other healthcare workers, they need immediate support – they need some semblance of hope.

Provinces regularly resort to short-sighted tactics to address their nursing shortage. Often, these amount to nothing but an expensive shell game, drawing nurses from one region to another. This approach will not end this crisis. We need to look upstream to address root causes, such as a lack of appropriate data to inform evidence-based health workforce planning. Governments desperately need this data to better forecast healthcare needs and build a truly responsive healthcare system.

Recently, over 60 national health professional organizations collectively urged the federal government to create a national health workforce agency and provide immediate targeted funding to support retention and recruitment efforts.

We simply can’t afford to continue planning in the dark when it comes to healthcare. It’s time to stop pretending that a responsive healthcare system will materialize out of thin air, absent the data, tools and leadership needed to do the job.

While the Prime Minister and Premiers are inarguably busy managing the pandemic, the nursing shortage is a looming crisis that threatens to undermine those very efforts – without a healthcare team, a bed is just a bed. This crisis demands equal and urgent governmental action and collaboration. It requires working across partisan and jurisdictional lines.

Now more than ever, nurses and their colleagues are desperate for optimism.  In 2022, let’s choose to put healthcare ahead of politics.

Linda Silas is a nurse and president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions.

Laura Jo Gunter

QUOI Media

As Canadian businesses recover from the effects of COVID-19, the productivity and skills gap twins have re-entered the conversation.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Canada continues to have low productivity scores. Our GDP forecast currently sits below the world average, and that gap is projected to increase over time. Meanwhile, disruptions due to technology, changing market demands and environmental, social and governance initiatives create hiring and retraining challenges for businesses.

The productivity and skills gap dilemma hobbles Canadian companies’ local and global competitiveness and threatens our economic recovery.

Unsurprisingly, these problems are directly connected; productivity is down due to a lack of talent. To fill the gap, we need to rethink our talent strategy.

In Canada, we often view our talent pipeline like a supply chain. Industry advises polytechnic institutions and colleges, and they produce graduates to meet the talent demand. This process is often effective, but a more integrated, partnership approach will take us to the next level.

Industry wants graduates who are job-ready, through a blend of education and workplace experiences. Industry also wants people currently in the workforce to have access to better, faster and more affordable options for reskilling and upskilling throughout their careers. The need for a more integrated relationship is clear.

It starts with a stronger linkage between post-secondary institutions and industry regarding talent pipeline development. At the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), we have the strategic goal of being industry’s most trusted partner when it comes to addressing their workforce needs.

The word partner is key. We envision NAIT and our industry partners working together in a much more active and cohesive way to create and maintain the talent pool necessary to sustain the economy.

We have established and proven work-integrated learning (WIL) models in post-secondary education, such as apprenticeship, co-ops and practicums. NAIT has approximately 10,000 students, including apprentices, participating in WIL. These models work so well that the Alberta government has recently set an ambitious goal of including WIL in 100 per cent of undergraduate programs.

In addition, the Alberta government wants to expand the apprenticeship model beyond skilled trades. We are re-imagining how the apprenticeship model could enhance education in professions such as IT, business and hospitality. 

Under this model, over 50 per cent of a student’s education would be delivered in the workplace. Companies benefit from hiring talent sooner, and students benefit from gaining work experience as they pursue their education.

The other major challenge that is critical for both individual and economic recovery is the upskilling and reskilling of the current workforce. Given the level and speed of disruption across sectors and labour markets, the need for rapid retraining and timely hiring with confidence is crucial.

NAIT is reimagining our value proposition when it comes to lifelong learning. We are evolving and expanding how we provide value to individuals so that we focus on filling the gaps in their skill sets by recognizing the knowledge that they already have obtained through on-the-job training and work experience. We also want to help businesses make good hiring decisions and reduce training costs.

We realized that our value comes not just from our role as a content provider, but also from our acknowledged status as an assessor and validator of skills and knowledge, and our ability to confer a recognizable credential. The concept of a microcredential – a specific credential that confirms a discreet set of skills or knowledge – has been gaining in popularity. Because microcredentials are so focused, they can help people demonstrate the specific competencies that employers are looking for.

NAIT is currently developing a direct microcredential model that assesses a person’s knowledge as a first step in upskilling or reskilling. If the individual passes the assessment, a microcredential is awarded. If not, then short courses can be provided to address only the identified skills gaps. This shortens retraining time and provides valid credentials to ease hiring decisions and talent deployment.

Recovering from the pandemic will depend on a different and integrated approach to address the skills gap and increase productivity. The federal government has a role to play, including supporting workforce reskilling initiatives and enhancing needed technical innovation, but we need ground-level solutions that come from polytechnics and industry working together. A more productive Canada starts with stronger partnerships.

Laura Jo Gunter is President and CEO at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

By Beatrice Olivastri

Canada has just delivered its draft regulations to ban single use plastics. That’s something to celebrate. 

Scientists have identified six plastic products most commonly found in Canadian litter: plastic checkout bags, stir sticks, six-pack rings, cutlery, straws and food service ware made from problematic plastics. Many businesses have anticipated the ban and have already made the switch to reusable or compostable products.

A ban on six single use products, while praiseworthy, should only be the beginning of the journey to leave plastic feedstock where it belongs – in the ground with other fossil fuels.

And there is a loophole in the regulations that allows manufacturing for export to continue. Such a loophole is unjust — we must not inflict more plastic pollution on nations in the Global South while banning it for ourselves.

If certain plastics are bad for Canadians, should Canadian companies be allowed to export them to other countries? Would such a loophole in Canada’s ban regulations for single use plastics undermine the February negotiations of a legally binding international treaty?

Plastic pollution is a global problem that goes far beyond the scope of litter. While the world’s attention is riveted by images of ocean wildlife speared by plastic straws or body cavities packed with plastic garbage, smaller, insidious particles of the same pollution dwell in you and me.

We ingest a credit card weight of plastic every week and we excrete it with a vague understanding of the “inflammation” it may be inflicting in our bodies. In a world’s regrettable first, Italian researchers found particles of micro-plastic in the placenta of pregnant women and in their fetus.

We know there are many pathways for plastic to move into our fresh water and our bodies, including plastic mulch on agricultural fields, laundry waste water, supposedly-flushable wipes in sewer lines, and plastic food containers used in a microwave. Fresh water-based micro-plastic, carrying hitch-hiker pollutants such as long buried PCBs, are eaten by fish, then eaten by you and me.  Harmful additives in plastics across the supply chain can include PFAS, phthalates, bisphenols, brominated flame retardants and heavy metals, as recently reported by the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN).

The feedstock for plastic is extracted from the tar sands just like natural gas, diesel fuel and asphalt. Big oil sees its future in plastic in a replay of Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. It’s critical that climate action shuts down the extraction of fossil fuels ensuring the backdoor to plastic production is slammed shut too.

When governments meet in February to debate a legally-binding global plastic treaty, Canada must step up to address the full lifecycle of plastics.

We must reduce our plastic pollution and stop dumping it on the Global South. We must ensure that independent scientists have ample funding for research on remedial action for plastic pollution we’ve already accumulated in our bodies, in fresh water, in oceans and on our land.

Beatrice Olivastri is the CEO of Friends of the Earth Canada.

Rob Farrelly

QUOI Media

Leslie and David have owned a successful restaurant for almost 20 years. But, as for everyone, COVID-19 has brought uncertainty and stress. There have been added costs associated with safety protocols and shrinking revenue tied to seating and capacity restrictions. Their insurance provider refuses to renew their policy and every new quote is 400 per cent higher than what they are currently paying. 

A global supply chain collapse and a sustained drought is driving food costs through the roof. Like every other restaurant owner, they have taken advantage of low interest COVID-19 support loans which are now all coming due. They have also been forced to tie their personal assets to the business to gain access to additional financing.

They are considering closing a few days a week because they cannot find enough staff to keep the doors open. A mass exodus of talent has left a giant hole in the labour pool forcing never-seen-before bidding wars for experienced employees. All of this, while government subsidies are set to run out. 

After two years of a sustained onslaught of challenges, they are faced with an impossible decision: dive further into debt or declare bankruptcy.  Not only will they lose their business, but their personal assets and financial security are on the line — with potentially catastrophic consequences.

This story is one of many.  It is mirrored across the hospitality landscape. 

The pandemic has taken a heavy toll on Canadian small business owners, especially in the hospitality industry. In August 2021, StatsCan reported that more businesses had closed rather than opened for the first time since May 2020. 

While there has been support for those who decided to soldier on through government subsidy programs, much of the financial shortfall has been offset by an increased debt load. As this debt now becomes due, many are still not seeing their revenues rebound enough to carry on.

Like Leslie and David, many restaurant owners have had enough and are throwing in the towel. To do this however, their only option is to declare bankruptcy, with potential dire consequences.

While business bankruptcies in the third quarter of 2021 recorded the lowest increases since 1987, these statistics do not capture those businesses owners who simply close the doors and walk away from their businesses — and creditors. 

It’s crucial for Canada to develop graceful exit strategies for business owners.  Entrepreneurs are in short supply, and we need them as part of a sustained economic recovery. Ideas for such measures could include agreements with banks not to enforce personal guarantees, establishing an office to support business owners through the process of winding down their businesses, and providing compensation for landlords in exchange for releasing tenants from long-term leases, to name a few.

Entrepreneurs and their families are going to suffer if they are unable to shut down their businesses without lasting impact on their own financial situations, not to mention the difficulties they will have starting much-needed new businesses.

Canadian small businesses have tried their best to keep the economy moving over the past two years. We, as consumers, have relied on their resilience and perseverance for our own survival.

It is only fair to support those, who — after almost two long years of fighting to survive — simply cannot do so any longer.

Rob Farrelly is the founder of GFV Financial Inc., which specializes in business intelligence solutions for breweries, bakeries and restaurants.