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Results: 1 - 15 of 29
Hassan Yussuff
View Hassan Yussuff Profile
Hassan Yussuff
2021-06-01 11:12
Thank you, Chair.
First let me thank the committee for the opportunity to present to you today.
I represent the Canadian Labour Congress, Canada's largest central labour body in the country, and it speaks on national issues on behalf of three million working men and women from coast to coast. The CLC, of course, supports Bill C-253, and I want to thank the members who voted to advance this bill.
For years, the CLC has advocated changing the bankruptcy laws in our country. Workers and pensioners should be first in line, not last, when it comes to paying creditors. Workers pay for their defined benefits, pensions and other post-retirement employment benefits by deferring part of their compensation. Employers have a legal obligation to pay these promised pensions in retirement. It is totally unacceptable that earned benefits are taken away from pensioners, through no fault of their own, at a time in their lives when they are least able to adjust. Pensioners cannot simply go back to work when their pensions are cut. They need the post-retirement drug coverage and benefits that they have earned through working for a lifetime.
This tragedy has gone on too long. It has occurred too often. It cannot go on any longer. It is time to fix this problem.
The insolvency process is rigged against working people. The recent Laurentian University example shows how small unions are isolated and besieged by CCAA proceedings. Workers are threatened with devastating job losses unless they agree to make deep concessions to wages, pensions and benefits.
The CLC believes that public institutions should be excluded altogether from the CCAA and the BIA. The federal insolvency laws are meant for commercial corporate reorganizations. They were never meant to provide cover for provincial governments that refuse to live up to their fiscal obligations and expect workers and pensioners to pay the costs. The CLC would prefer that the claims of workers and pensioners be moved to the front of the line, as Bill C-253 seeks to do.
If there is no consensus to do so, the CLC believes that all parties should consider granting pensioners' and employees' claims the status of “preferred claim”. This would place them immediately behind the secure creditors in priority of claims, but ahead of unsecured creditors. We believe that treating employees' claims as preferred claims will materially improve outcomes for workers and pensioners.
However, getting the data to establish this is not easy. Currently the data is controlled by the big accounting firms—especially Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers —that act as monitors in CCAA proceedings and trustees in bankruptcies. There is a clear public policy purpose for making this data available for researchers. We are seeking aggregate anonymized data for large business insolvencies in which pension deficits are involved. We are not seeking commercially sensitive data. In our view, the superintendent of bankruptcy should be required to obtain this data from monitors and make it available to researchers.
We also recommend that the federal government conduct a feasibility study to establish a national mandatory pension insurance scheme for Canada. This study should form the basis of discussions with the provinces to establish a national scheme to rescue stranded pensions.
Finally, the government must stop company executives from enriching themselves and shareholders when there is a serious pension deficit.
The 2017 Sears Canada CCAA filing and liquidation was an outrage. Beginning in 2010, Sears paid $1.5 billion to shareholders in dividends and share buybacks. By doing so, Sears paid five and a half times more to its shareholders than it would have cost to entirely erase the deficit in its DB pension plan. Sears' decision in 2013 to pay a $500-million dividend when the pension deficit stood at $313 million would alone have been enough to eliminate the deficit. Instead, Sears Canada pensioners outside of Ontario were forced to accept cuts in benefits. This is a profound injustice. It should never be permitted to happen again.
Thank you very much. I look forward to any questions that committee members may have.
I wish all the best to you.
Fanny Sie
View Fanny Sie Profile
Fanny Sie
2020-06-05 14:23
This pandemic has exacerbated many existing gaps in our health care system while showing the immense value that the life sciences sector brings. Issues such as system capacity, lack of virtual care and data fragmentation across the country are igniting a pressing demand for sustainable change. We have started to see incredible flexibility and leadership in our health system's immediate response to the pandemic. However, it's important to use learnings from this crisis to catalyze meaningful long-term change.
As we shift the focus to recovery, there are great opportunities to accelerate innovation and move our country forward. The future of life sciences in Canada is extraordinarily bright. There are many actions that the government can take to promote growth at home and abroad.
First, the federal government should revive the health and biosciences economic strategy table. The announcement of the industry strategy council is a good start, but we encourage the government—with input from industry, patients and other sector stakeholders—to revitalize this work to identify specific and measurable next steps. It's also important to acknowledge the need to rethink some of the recommendations in the context of pandemic planning and of building our capacity for the next potential crisis.
Second, a strong data ecosystem is a key success factor in the response to COVID-19. The pandemic has exposed significant limitations in the ability to collect, access, integrate, share and analyze high-quality data. It has also magnified concerns that data cannot be easily compared between jurisdictions, as each province uses different data collection methodologies, standards and policies. Furthermore, most provincial data is publicly inaccessible and incomprehensive. We believe that we can win this fight through the sharing of safe and secure health care data and knowledge, abiding by local privacy laws, to better inform patient care and health system decision-making.
Lastly, there needs to be an increase in investments in programs like the Scale AI and the digital superclusters that Roche is very proud to be a part of. COVID-19 has demonstrated the catastrophic effects to both patient health and the economy as a result of a lack of constant innovation in our sector. By rewarding innovation and increasing investment into innovative technologies, such as genomic sequencing, cloud computing, digital health tools for remote patient care and monitoring, as well as medicines that deliver superior outcomes, we stand to deliver unprecedented value in both health benefits for patients and economic growth for our country. These technologies will position Canada as a leader in personalized health care and allow us to provide patients with exactly what they need from their health care systems.
Whether through diagnostics, medicines or insights, Roche is a committed partner, helping to navigate and ultimately end the COVID-19 pandemic. The life sciences sector has the amazing potential to lead the economic recovery of this country. Healthy Canadians bring a healthy economy. Through collaboration with patients, patient organizations, companies like Roche and the government, we can mobilize these ideas into action.
Thank you very much for your time today. We are happy to address any questions you may have.
View Majid Jowhari Profile
Lib. (ON)
That will definitely help the front-line workers. Great.
Let's go quickly to Madam Sie.
You talked about a three-gap system capacity and also data fragmentation. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to get the second one. I really want to focus on the data fragmentation. You talked about the data ecosystem: collect, assess, analyze and share. As it relates to the testing, I think access to this information and the participation in those is a key question as the rate of adoption of these various applications are being questioned.
I only have about 45 seconds. Can you expand on how important that is in helping complete the circle around data fragmentation?
Fanny Sie
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Fanny Sie
2020-06-05 14:46
I completely agree with you. I think testing data is important because it gives us a pulse on who is a confirmed case versus who potentially has immunity. There's also looking at the epidemiological evidence, where you cannot particularly test it in an individual, but you can look at population risk patterns to determine the probability of somebody having COVID. The combination of those types of data together can breed a really nice emergence strategy or something that we can use for pandemic planning. I completely agree with you, but there's a much larger picture to take into account, and that fragmentation is not helping.
View Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Profile
Lib. (ON)
Fanny, you've spoken about the importance of data. If you were to grade Canada and provinces in sharing data, what grade would we have to date, dealing with the greatest threat to health in my lifetime?
Fanny Sie
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Fanny Sie
2020-06-05 15:20
If I were to do a scale of one to 10, I would love to say that we were on the upper edge of that. Unfortunately, I have to be honest, so I'll say a six.
View Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Profile
Lib. (ON)
Okay, so it's a barely passing grade. To fix the data sharing, which is critical.... You talked about surveillance testing, strategic testing. Data's critical for doing that. B.C.'s been successful because of that, not just the capacity to test but also to test smartly. What are your recommendations for improving the use of data with respect to testing and tracing?
Fanny Sie
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Fanny Sie
2020-06-05 15:21
As I noted in my initial comments, I think it's important to do a combination of both. It would be nice if we could test every single person every single day, but that's not going to happen. It's like taking what we can from our capacity and then complementing it with data, and doing that in an intelligent way as we gradually open up the markets. We open up to one level, and then we do monitoring or testing. We open up to the next level, and then we monitor. That level of combination analysis would be optimal, in my eyes.
View Lloyd Longfield Profile
Lib. (ON)
View Lloyd Longfield Profile
2020-06-05 15:36
Mrs. Sie, I'd like to switch over to data. I love data. It's just one of those things, right? You love it or you hate it, but when you look at the data science coalition.... I'm looking at manufacturing plants and large numbers of employees going into certain situations, maybe even office towers—people going into office towers—and how we aggregate data to do proper contact tracing.
How are we working with manufacturers and supply chains to more adequately share the information? You mentioned some gaps and fragmentation. Is there a solution that you're working on with government and industry?
Fanny Sie
View Fanny Sie Profile
Fanny Sie
2020-06-05 15:37
Yes. I would say that the data science coalition is actually a unique view into the future. We decided to go 10 years into the future because all of a sudden, all of these multi-industry organizations, whether they were start-ups or multinationals, decided that we're all one company. We're all going to make sure that we're mission-focussed and mandate-focussed. We're going to get rid of the pandemic.
We started to share resources. We started to share data, and then all of sudden, there was an expediting of digital solutions that could be used for the pandemic, and we're using our channels to try to mobilize that information as fast as possible. It started with a critical mass, but I see it expanding outside of the typical players.
View Lloyd Longfield Profile
Lib. (ON)
View Lloyd Longfield Profile
2020-06-05 15:37
The Mozilla Corporation has a saying that you work openly and you share data, you share information and you get better solutions.
How does this fit within an IP structure, which is contrary to that?
Fanny Sie
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Fanny Sie
2020-06-05 15:38
When we think about open data, the benefit of looking at open data is to see the actual benefits of data so you can prove that it actually works. Then there's that decision: What do we compete on and what do we not compete on? I think in the future there's going to be this industry coalition or decision or table where we say, okay, no one's getting into the market right now, so let's decide that we're not going to compete in this are. But then we'll compete in this area, and I see that working.
View Lloyd Longfield Profile
Lib. (ON)
View Lloyd Longfield Profile
2020-06-05 15:38
And in the meantime, saving lives.... Why not?
Fanny Sie
View Fanny Sie Profile
Fanny Sie
2020-06-05 15:38
Absolutely.
View Lloyd Longfield Profile
Lib. (ON)
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