44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 6, 2021 11:00AM
- Dec/6/21 11:17:16 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Mr. Speaker, I think what is happening in Canada is deeply troubling.
We pride ourselves on our willingness to be good neighbours, that is who we are as Canadians, and yet we are seeing with the anti-vax protest a really disturbing rise in toxic behaviour. This past weekend in Edmonton, a mob attacked a children's store. What is with that? In my region, a small-town doc who was a hero to so many people shut her practice because of online harassment. We have had young mothers attacked at vaccine clinics in my region. I could never have imagined in a thousand years that a mother and her child would be attacked and shouted down by a mob for trying to keep her child safe.
We have legislation here for our frontline health workers, but I want to ask my hon. colleague about the larger level of toxicity and this kind of anti-science violence that we are seeing that is targeting families and people who are trying to get through a really difficult time.
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- Dec/6/21 3:45:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I just wanted to get clarification on such a serious issue as this. I would be surprised if the Conservatives would play partisan games when we are talking about the memorial that needs to be done and that every member should be a part of.
There may have been a mistake from the member, but I think that she may be asked the question again because it shows really abominable politicization of such a horrific—
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- Dec/6/21 4:00:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order, because this is about the rights of all members to a safe work environment. It is about the obligations parliamentarians have to respect the law of Canada. The belief of some parliamentarians that they are above the law of Canada is troubling. We can look at the human rights rulings on privacy that have already been made. For someone to say that their right to keep their medical information private in a pandemic supersedes the right of a workplace to have a safe environment, those privacy rights do not trump the others. I did not use the word “trump” there deliberately, but it certainly had its effect.
I would ask the Speaker to also consider recent court rulings. The ATU ruling on the TTC, and the Quebec Superior Court ruling, have been very clear about the needs and rights of the employer, which is us as the collective members of the House, not just to each other, but to the staff who work here and the cleaners. The claim by the Conservatives, that they believe they have the privilege to ignore pandemic law and the human rights and privacy rulings that have come down and that have all been clear, and that there is a privilege in the House to override them and put people at risk, is an infringement of my rights as a parliamentarian and my obligation to ensure that everyone in the House is kept safe.
This is bigger than us. This is bigger than the bickering and bantering among the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc. This is about the message we are sending to Canada right now. It is a message that in the House of Commons, in order to preserve the privileges of an elite group, the Conservative members can override the pandemic standards and the rights of privacy that have to be balanced with the rights of safety. Mr. Speaker, I would ask you to consider what we have seen already coming down from the Human Rights Commission.
As for the issue of exemptions, I understand that it is not my business to look at the exemption of any member, but it is statistically ridiculous to suggest that a number of Conservatives can claim exemptions when we know that the medical exemptions are minutely small. We end up with parliamentarians coming in saying that they have pieces of paper stating they have an exemption, which is a ridiculous and unfair situation. A number of Conservatives are doing that.
I will close with this. I have to share a lobby with Conservatives who walk around without their masks on. I am being put at risk by the fact that I do not know if any of them have these paper exemptions or if they have been vaccinated. I do not need to know, but I need to know that the House will be there to protect my rights and those of all the staff who have to deal with the Conservatives who walk around without masks on.
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- Dec/6/21 4:45:51 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Madam Speaker, we are all deeply concerned about these attacks on health care workers, particularly those who are already suffering through the pandemic, as they are on the front lines. We have certainly seen it across the country at hospitals and with paramedics.
It now looks as though the anti-vax extremists are shifting gear and moving away from hospitals. We saw a horrific incident in Edmonton this past weekend where they attacked a toy store. The idea of these brutes showing up at a toy store at Christmastime with their anti-vax conspiracies suggests to me there is something more insidious taking place with extremist behaviour in Canada.
How do we as parliamentarians start addressing this if, after we protect our hospitals and frontline workers, they decide to shift to schools or toy stores? This is a serious issue. I would ask my hon. colleague for his comments.
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- Dec/6/21 5:02:30 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Madam Speaker, I appreciate my hon. colleague recognizing Dr. Gretchen Roedde, who gave up her practice because of harassment. I called her before the story broke. I could not believe how tired and dispirited she was. This is a woman who has gone through child soldier roadblocks in Africa to get medical supplies, a doctor who would take the freighter canoes up Lake Temagami. She has never been tired or intimidated and she loves the north.
I want to ask my colleague what he thinks is happening when in small towns like ours, this kind of disinformation and extremism is causing such damage to front-line medical workers like Dr. Roedde, paramedics and the nurses who are just so tired of what they have faced throughout the pandemic.
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- Dec/6/21 6:37:02 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Madam Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to stand in the House, representing the people of Timmins—James Bay, and to be here in the House tonight as we, from all parties, attempt to pass legislation on what is coming close to the second anniversary of the pandemic.
If someone had said to me in March 2020 that we would be in the House debating the need to get 10 days of paid sick leave or to have laws in place to stop the harassment and threats of medical professionals by people who are our neighbours, I would have said it was simply impossible.
COVID has taught us, and COVID is a very hard teacher, but it has been clear from the get-go that it is something bigger than anything that was within our human imagination. Our generation has never seen anything like this. Throughout COVID, I find myself going back to Albert Camus's The Plague. I have been reading it and rereading it. He wrote:
Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves.
He went on:
They disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is people who pass away, [especially those who] haven’t taken their precautions.
When we are talking about the need to have 10 days of paid sick leave two years into a pandemic, I feel like we have found ourselves in some kind of dark, dystopian Groundhog Day, that what we are repeating again and again are the same mistakes, and we are still having difficulty learning the lessons of a pandemic. The pandemic does not care whether we believe in it or not; the pandemic does not care if it is fair, and the pandemic certainly does not care about the short-term goals of various political leaders like Jason Kenney, who decided to announce that last summer was going to be the greatest summer ever, because he was simply going to ignore health protocols in order to make his party look good. He plunged Alberta into medical chaos and caused the deaths of too many innocent people.
I think of Doug Ford. As people were dying in warehouses in Peel, Brampton and the 401 and 905 areas, he was not willing to put paid sick leave in. In fact, he recently said he believed that come January there would be no need for vaccine mandates. This is a man who is still refusing to learn lessons.
We know here of the culpability of the Canadian government in fighting at the WTO against the right of the global south to create vaccines. Did anyone think that omicron would not happen, and that we would allow ourselves first-wave and second-wave boosters and protect ourselves but not ensure adequate vaccination in other parts of the globe, and that somehow the pandemic would not go there and come back? Now we are dealing with omicron.
Camus says that we have learned that the pandemic has made us all share the same collective fate. It is a hard lesson we are learning.
I remember how everyone rose up in the first wave and how hopeful it was. People took up hobbies and people were going to get themselves physically fit. Camus said, “At first, the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration.”
I think, in the isolation and difficulties, the vast majority of people carried on. This morning, when I walked through the snowstorms in Ottawa, I saw almost every single person wearing a mask. The vast majority of people have taken up what they know is going to be a difficult and maybe long-term issue. Sure, they complain. They have a right to complain, but they carry on.
In the first and second waves, people phoned our offices daily. We tried to help, we tried to give them answers and we tried to keep businesses going. Those people had legitimate fears, fears about the future of their business, fears about health care, fears about all the disinformation and falsehoods. They were all legitimate questions because we were dealing with something bigger than ourselves.
I found by the fourth wave that things had shifted to a sullen tiredness in the vast majority of people. However, a small minority of people had gone to a different place, a kind of radicalized sense of self-isolation and self-entitlement, a belief that somehow the government, the medical institutions and their neighbours were all against their right to go and do what they had always wanted to do. They were not doing their share, so the rest of the population was doing it.
Then we started seeing these terrible images that compared the mass murder of the Jewish families in Ukraine with the fact that Buddy could not go to East Side Mario's because he refused to get a vaccine. Then they began to turn on front-line medical workers. I talked to paramedics who said to me, “What is it about us?” These paramedics were out in the middle of the night on the highways at accidents, or were helping during the opioid crises, or were on the front-lines at the hospitals. They wanted to know why they were being targeted. In my region, a doctor was harassed and gave up her practice.
There is something deeply wrong when we have to come here at this point. Finally, after two years, we recognize the fundamental medical principle that if people are feeling sick, they should not go to work. That is the most common-sense way to stop the spread, particularly now with omicron variant.
The fact that we need to have a law to protect workers from harassment is deeply concerning. We will stand up for the medical workers and we will bring that law in. However, in doing that, let us not forget and let us not diminish the fact that there is incredible fortitude among the Canadian people.
I was very disheartened to hear my Conservative colleague talk about how we had to accommodate people who denied science, people who denied the need to have a collective responsibility for their neighbours, as opposed to saying no, that we stand for the right of people to go to work and be safe, that when people go to work, school or the hospital, they can go home at the end of the day even in these hard and uncertain times because they know their government is taking every step possible. That is part of what we are here to do tonight.
We need to address the need to change the TRIPS waiver. Canada has to stop being a laggard on the international stage. It has to show leadership. We are, as Camus says, all collectively in the same boat when it comes to the pandemic.
I would like to end by quoting Camus again, because what isolation has taught me is the power of family, the power of community and certainly, for me, the power of live music, which I hope comes back. Camus writes about the people in the village and says, “They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.” He said that out of the plague that affected the people in his town, that he realized there was so much more to admire in people than to despise.
Finally, and I find this so powerful because I am so tired and disheartened and hurt by what COVID has done to the fabric of our communities and our sense of confidence and our ability to see each. Camus says, “What's true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well”, because it helps people “rise above themselves.”
We are in the fourth wave or the beginning of a fifth wave, I do not know how many waves, but we are not out of the COVID pandemic. It is with us now, but we do not have to give in to it. We do not have to give in to fear and we do not have to give in to stupidity. There are smart ways. It is the only way we can take on COVID and restore that sense of human community and the bond that keeps us together.
I urge my colleagues to support the legislation.
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- Dec/6/21 6:48:15 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Madam Speaker, I found it deeply concerning that my Conservative colleagues throughout this discussion, where we were all coming to terms with the need to protect health care workers, have continually insinuated that there is something reasonable about anti-vaxxers and that we should accommodate them when we have threats being made against children at toy stores, and then equating that with the right to protest of indigenous peoples.
The right of indigenous peoples to defend their lands and their territories is a fundamental principle that we have to stand up for in this House. I will always stand up in this House and say the right of indigenous peoples to defend their territories is a fundamental, universal principle whether the Conservatives and some of their anti-vax supporters like that or not.
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- Dec/6/21 6:50:02 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Madam Speaker, certainly, I think the deepest concern we had is that our leader pushed the Prime Minister 20-some times in the House on the need to have 10 days paid sick leave as the first, second and third waves were hammering people and we saw such massive deaths particularly in the for-profit, long-term care system, and we saw no action. It was not until the election was called that the Prime Minister suddenly had that come to God moment where he realized, “Please re-elect me and I will bring in something” that we had been asking for all along.
I am glad that we are bringing it in now. I am glad that we will get to committee to make sure that it works, but I think of all the people in long-term care who could have used this when the government refused to act.
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- Dec/6/21 6:51:53 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Madam Speaker, let us always remember the incredible work the health care workers are doing. In Parry Sound the paramedics are going door to door right now to help people. They are doing home visits. That is how we step up in Canada. We have to be there for all our health care workers and all our frontline workers in every capacity to protect them from the kind of harassment that is ongoing.
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