Theresa Tam’s Public Health Agency seeks to monitor Canadians' confidential medical records

The Government of Canada has put out a call to hire someone to track and trace the medical records of all Canadians.

In a publication released on March 6, Health Canada put out a call for a supplier to help strengthen public health surveillance through primary care insights.

The description states that Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems are widely used in Canadian primary care settings and offer significant potential for disease surveillance. The “Pan-Canadian primary care EMR data is recognized as valuable for federal public health surveillance programs,” it reads. “The recently released Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy emphasizes the importance of primary care research moving towards real-time data sharing and person-centric data.”

Naturally, the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is run by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) which says that COVID-19 “highlighted issues that make it a challenge to collect, share, and use health data for the benefit of Canadians. 'Health data' includes public health, health system and population health data.”

The strategy is run by an expert advisory group chaired by Dr. Vivek Goel in combination with a collection of 17 other taxpayer-funded bureaucratic members. Their 2022 Health Data Strategy report said that “The inability to integrate data in real-time across hospitals, primary care, testing, vaccination, and genomics (among others) impair insights to measure the efficacy of vaccines, track the emergence of variants of concern, and mount efforts to address health inequities.”

The strategy began with the Safe Restart Agreement in the fall of 2020, that dedicated more than $19 billion in federal funds to help provinces and territories “safely restart their economies and make our country more resilient to possible future surges in cases of COVID-19.”

This spurred the COVID-19 Health Data and Evidence Virtual Library, whose short term data priorities included critical data on hospitalizations, case counts, testing, as well as vaccines' safety, coverage and effectiveness.

Now PHAC’s recent supplier offering says that it “needs access to timely and high-quality primary care EMR data, covering all Canadian provinces and territories, in a secured environment. This access should also include supporting documentation, training, and analytical work services.”

Yet the agency is expanding its capacity to include “risk assessment and trend analysis in priority areas such as long covid, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and mental health.”

PHAC seeks to utilize a contractor's innovative, validated tools to access primary care EMR data. They state they will work with a Research Ethics Board (REB) for approvals and training certificates, but ultimately they aim for comprehensive access and “extraction tools” to capture full charts and clinical encounter notes.

Has the general public been informed and consulted to determine whether or not they want their primary care data solicited by the federal government, including the methods and duration of data usage and storage? And are there any opt-in or opt-out provisions available to Canadians and if so, how is that conducted?

Rebel News reached out to the contact listed on the tender page to ask just that.

Procurement and Contracting Officer Sayed Elias Abedi did not respond to the query.

Concern over the Pan-Canadian EMR system becoming a tool of Public Health to infringe on travel rights, ostracize individuals from society, and utilize general coercion tactics to gain vaccine uptake compliance persists, especially as it did throughout the COVID-19 hysteria during vaccine passports. This arises as a result of the government's own website referring to the medical apartheid system of vaccine passports as simply the “pan-Canadian.”

Will it be a broader extension of other health data utilization like the Ontario-specific Panorama system, that aims to facilitate a provincial immunization system where individuals, healthcare providers and public health all have real-time access to immunization information?

Amidst these developments, concerns around rights, privacy, segregation, bodily autonomy, and informed consent remain. This is especially true as PHAC is the same agency that continually disregards privacy at the helm of health necromancer Theresa Tam, who sought to monitor the online activity of the vaccine hesitant and hired private company BlueDot to track and monitor Canadians' personal cellphone data to ensure compliance with COVID-related public health measures.