Page - 95 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

95Pandemic Data Sharing: How the Canadian Constitution Has Turned into a Suicide Pact data that epidemiologists require to analyze a pandemic and model strategies to vanquish it—the provinces insist that the data belong to them, to share or not with the federal government as they please. Worse, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) does not chal- lenge this view. Our thesis is that between them, the federal and provincial governments have failed to exchange the data which are the sine qua non for Canada battling COVID-19 scientifically and effectively. Just as farmers need accurate weather information from Environment Canada to plant, and businesses need precise economic information from Statistics Canada to thrive, public health planners need timely and complete epidemiological information to battle emerging pan- demics. Without complete, timely epidemiological data from all parts of the country, it is impossible to navigate scientifically, and Canada must instead cross this maelstrom blindfolded, at an intolerable cost of wasted lives and money. In this chapter, we discuss the history of how Canada reached this situation, and what can be done to fix it, while reminding read- ers of previous warnings foretelling the very crisis of epidemiological data sharing and avoidable death that Canada now faces.3 The History of Canada’s Pandemic Governance Canada has a sorry history of reactively legislating for public health only after being clobbered by a crisis. Parliament created the first federal Department of Health in 1919, while the failures in Canada’s response to the Spanish Flu pan- demic were on full display.4 It did so in terrorem, following a massive second wave of the influenza in fall 1918 that claimed nearly as many as died in the First World War.5 While the agent of the pandemic was a new influenza virus, the cause of much excess death was Canada’s 3. Amir Attaran & Kumanan Wilson, “A Legal and Epidemiological Justification for Federal Authority in Health Emergencies” (2007) 52 McGill LJ 381; Amir Attaran, “A Legislative Failure of Epidemic Proportions” (2008) 179 Can Medical Assoc J 9; Amir Attaran & Elvina Chow, “Why Canada Is Dangerously Unprepared for Epidemic Diseases: A Legal and Constitutional Diagnosis” (2011) 5 JPPL 287. 4. An  Act  Respecting  the  Department  of  Health, SA 1919, c 16. See (1919) Canada 8-9 George V, Parliament of the United Kingdom; (1919) Canada 9-10 George V, 13th Parl, 2nd Sess, 1919, 87–90. 5. Mark Humphries, The  Last  Plague:  Spanish  Influenza  and  the  Politics  of  Public  Health  in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).