Canada’s top public health post handed to globalist insider

The rise of Nancy Hamzawi to PHAC president shows Ottawa doubling down on bureaucracy over expertise

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Nancy Hamzawi’s appointment as president of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) should alarm Canadians who value privacy, limited government and medical freedom.

Although the recently resigned Theresa Tam was often called Canada’s “top doctor,” she reported to the PHAC president. Now Hamzawi becomes the fifth person to hold that position in just five years.

Unlike Tam, Hamzawi has no medical training—only a deep résumé in bureaucracy. And like Tam, she appears comfortably aligned with big government, big pharma and global institutions.

Hamzawi holds a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Ottawa. She became assistant deputy minister of the science and technology branch at Environment and Climate Change Canada in 2018. According to her biography, she helped make Canada a world leader in addressing climate change and “plastic pollution.”

That leadership came at a cost. Canada is now implementing one of the most burdensome regulatory regimes on domestic manufacturers in the world. The new plastics registry will require businesses to report on the entire lifecycle of plastic—from production to disposal—feeding a government information machine at great expense, with no clear environmental payoff.

Hamzawi later became assistant deputy minister of Health Canada’s health products and food branch, another area where excessive regulation threatens an entire industry. Recent Liberal governments repeatedly attempted to force natural health product providers to prove efficacy through the same costly trials required for pharmaceutical drugs.

Past government consultations concluded this approach would do more harm than good. Herbs and traditional medicines have been used for centuries with excellent safety records. The real winners of such drug-level testing requirements would be expanding bureaucracies funded by new fees and fines and big pharmaceutical companies that benefit from sidelining their competition.

For a time, Hamzawi also served as acting federal lead and assistant deputy minister of policy and strategic integration for the COVID-19 Testing, Contact Tracing and Data Strategy Secretariat at Health Canada. During the pandemic, surveillance in the name of public health reached new heights of intrusiveness and new lows of accountability.

PHAC accessed the location data of 33 million mobile devices using “de-identified cell-tower based location data,” a method of tracking and analyzing the general movement patterns of mobile devices without directly identifying the individual users, from January 2019 to May 2023, reaching back even before the pandemic began.

PHAC also co-developed the ArriveCan app with the Canada Border Services Agency and formally owned it until mid-2022. Both agencies shared user data without a formal agreement. A later auditor general report criticized this “accountability void.”

ArriveCan, initially projected to cost $80,000, ballooned into a $59.5-million boondoggle. The glitch-prone app remained mandatory for cross-border air travel and, in 2022, wrongly instructed 10,000 vaccinated travellers to quarantine. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner also investigated complaints about how personal data was handled.

PHAC developed the COVID Alert app as well, intended to notify users of potential virus exposures. However, given the unreliability of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test results and the limited risk to most Canadians, the app likely spread more fear than safety among its 6.9 million users. Polymerase Chain Reaction is used to detect genetic material, most commonly used to identify the presence of viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Hamzawi may not bear primary responsibility for these failures, but she shares in them. Her record does not merit promotion. Yet in February 2023, she was named executive vice-president of health at PHAC.

Now, she holds the top job at an agency that has shown no remorse for embracing one of the most questionable global health strategies in modern history: lockdowns, masking, social distancing, mass quarantines, reliance on flawed PCR testing, rushed mRNA vaccines and the suppression of dissenting voices.

Had Canada adopted a focused protection approach—safeguarding the vulnerable while preserving freedom for the rest—as recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration, it could have avoided the enormous social and economic costs now weighing on the country. But Canadian health officials and the World Health Organization have shown no interest in such a reckoning.

In fact, the WHO is doubling down. On May 20, the World Health Assembly adopted the Pandemic Agreement, enabling even more sweeping measures in future emergencies. The agreement has raised alarms that international dictates could override national sovereignty and erode citizens’ rights, privacy and freedoms.

Don’t expect Hamzawi to push back. Her bio also says she “has also held several executive leadership positions in international affairs, regulatory programs and policy, and audit and evaluation.” Whatever the WHO has planned, she will almost certainly take Canada right along.

Canadians should be concerned.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.