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OTTAWA – The federal Liberals are creating a new agency to beef up Canada’s ability to handle rapidly spreading infectious diseases and protect from future pandemics.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the agency is meant to preserve the “top-gun team” of public servants that helped steer Canadians through COVID-19.

Health Emergency Readiness Canada is being tasked with boosting Canada’s life-sciences sector and ensuring Canadians get faster access to vaccines, medical therapies and diagnostics by accelerating the transition from research to commercialization.

“The danger would have been (that) if we don’t have a permanent agency sitting somewhere, that collective knowledge that we have accumulated during COVID would even be dispersed eventually, perhaps even lost within the civil service,” Champagne told reporters on Tuesday.

“We’re pulling them together in a team so that when people are talking about health, emergency readiness, they know where to knock.”

The new agency will be based in the Industry Department but include staff from the Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada. Champagne said it requires no new legislation and is based on spending Parliament already approved through this year’s budget.

“We want to keep a very close nexus with industry,” Champagne said.

The agency will co-ordinate efforts between Canadian industry and academic researchers as well as with international partners.

This follows a similar move by the European Union to create an agency in 2021 that not only tries to prepare the continent for pandemics, but seeks to learn from mistakes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Canada was not adequately prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic with an outdated and understocked emergency stockpile, and a virtually non-existent vaccine production industry.

Last year, the British Medical Journal called out Canada’s “major pandemic failures” such as jurisdictional wrangling and a high death rate in long-term care homes.

Yet the Trudeau government has resisted calls from medical experts and the NDP to follow countries like the U.K. in having an inquiry into how governments handled the COVID-19 pandemic and how they could better manage a future pandemic.

When asked about an inquiry, Champagne said the announcement is focused on having the right materials and researchers on hand when needed.

“We all hope that there be no other pandemic. But the responsible thing to do is to make sure that you have the team stand by and ready,” he said.

Champagne told a biotechnology industry gathering on Friday that officials found Canada was not ready in co-ordinating “health emergency readiness” when peers started looking into preparing for future events.

“We realized that 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 on research and industrial mobilization if another health emergency like a pandemic is declared.

Champagne said the pandemic and investments in personalized medicine have made the public enthusiastic about the biotechnology sector.

“If there is one industry that I think Canadians have fallen in love again with, it’s certainly that industry,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

EDMONTON – An Alberta doctors‘ group says even though a new pay deal with the province is ready to be implemented, the government isn’t putting its money where its mouth is.

Dr. Shelley Duggan, the Alberta Medical Association’s new president, says doctors are worried the province’s health-care system is on the verge of collapse, and the pay deal is still waiting on approval from the province’s Treasury Board.

Former association president Dr. Paul Parks says Premier Danielle Smith promised the deal by September and the delay is hurting the struggling health-care system.

Parks says the government’s work to break up the provincial health authority is sparking chaos and that creating multiple administrative layers could stifle co-ordination.

Health Minister Adriana LaGrange recently said the government is committed to getting a fair and sustainable compensation model for primary care physicians.

Late last year, Smith announced $200 million in federal funding over two years to help physicians keep their practices open, with the province rolling out another $57 million in February.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 23, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

HALIFAX – A Nova Scotia woman has applied for a medically assisted death, saying after years of battling to receive out-of-country surgery for an illness that causes “indescribable” pain, she struggles to maintain the will to live.

Jennifer Brady completed her MAID application in June. She has lymphedema in her legs, a condition in which tissues swell from the accumulation of fluids normally drained through the body’s lymphatic system.

In an interview Thursday, the 46-year-old mother of two said she has intense daily pain, skin infections that resemble a sunburn intensified “1,000 times,” and blood infections that exhaust her to the point “you feel like you’re dying.”

However, Brady said that after she received treatment in Japan in 2022 — at her own expense — her swelling decreased, particularly in her right leg, and some symptoms were relieved. She said she believes that if she can receive the funds to pay for more surgery, her condition can improve — as will her desire to remain alive.

The possibility that her health can improve is what led to her MAID request being denied.

In a letter sent to Health Minister Michelle Thompson on July 7, Dr. Gord Gubitz, the clinical lead of Nova Scotia’s MAID program, said his team is rejecting Brady’s application because her condition is not considered “irremediable.”

“It seems reasonable to me that if an assessment (and surgery, if clinically indicated) … could help to reduce Brady’s suffering and obviate the need to consider MAID, this option should be explored. Your office can make this happen,” Gubitz wrote to Thompson.

After telling her story to CBC this week, Brady said she has received online support from people offering encouragement and financial help. However, she said she still needs the health minister to authorize funding for treatment she cannot get in the province.

On Wednesday, Thompson told reporters, “I will not make a commitment to do that,” and then added, “If that individual will work with the department and reach out, perhaps there is another path forward.” The minister refused detailed comment, citing an ongoing court case and privacy law.

In Brady’s case before the Nova Scotia Supreme Court launched over two years ago, she took issue with the province’s decision to deny her funding for out-of-country care, arguing it was unreasonable and unfair.

In legal briefs, government lawyers argued Brady failed to receive a referral for the treatment. The lawyers said she was on a wait-list to see a Nova Scotia plastic surgeon and became “frustrated.”

Brady’s January 2024 affidavit responding to the lawyers said that given her physical deterioration, the plastic surgeon’s years-long waiting time and his lack of expertise in her illness, “the department created standards that were functionally impossible to meet.”

On Thursday, Brady said she found the minister’s latest comments frustrating and “somewhat disingenuous,” adding that they left her wondering whether Thompson had personally reviewed her case.

She said that even if she wins in court and is awarded about $60,000 in costs related to her 2022 treatment in Japan, the years of legal battles, the continuing pain and her deteriorating mental health have led to her decision that MAID is the best option. “It was after a winter where I could barely get out of bed and when I did, I just didn’t want to be here.”

Brady spends at least five hours daily in a full body massage machine that helps move fluid in her legs to reduce swelling. “I mean, what’s the point honestly? I’m in that machine and the machine itself is so uncomfortable.”

Applying for MAID “definitely isn’t a strategic move,” she said. “That’s not my plan A. I want to live. I want to be here for my kids. I love my job.”

“I want the option (of MAID) to be there. But if I were given the treatment today (for lymphedema) I would definitely take it,” she said.

Brady, a dietitian and professor at Acadia University’s faculty of nutrition, said she is also suffering from depression, a condition for which she’s been unable to take medicines as they tend to increase the swelling in her legs.

Her lymphedema developed after a hysterectomy to treat her cervical cancer in 2019. She said she was informed in 2021 that local surgical options weren’t available to her, which led her to Dr. Joshua Vortenbosch, an expert in lymphedema at McGill University. However, she was denied funding for the surgery in Montreal. The rejection led her to do research, and to her 2022 trip for surgery in Japan.

In Japan, she received lymphovenous anastomosis, a procedure in which a surgeon connects lymph vessels in the limbs to nearby veins to bypass damaged areas and restore the flow of lymph fluids.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 20, 2024.

— With files from Keith Doucette in Halifax.