44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 10, 2022 10:00AM
- Feb/10/22 10:24:32 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as the Leader of the Opposition knows, I am from Alberta, and Alberta has chosen to lift, or will be lifting, almost all of the restrictions. I just want to share something from a University of Alberta Hospital—
Some hon. members: Hear, hear!
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- Feb/10/22 10:24:56 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am glad that my colleagues in the Conservative Party find my comments so enthralling.
Dr. Stephanie Smith, a University of Alberta Hospital physician and infectious disease specialist, has said:
All those poor Albertans, there are many still waiting for their elective surgeries and to have all these restrictions removed with the possibility of having some increased transmission and maybe more hospitalizations, that’s just pushing those surgeries further down the line, which is not what we are trying to achieve.
Would the Leader of the Opposition believe that it makes sense for us to be more reasonable about how we evaluate these public health restrictions and recognize that, as more than 3,500 Albertans have died from COVID-19, we need to not be using a political lens but using a health care lens to make the decisions on restrictions?
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- Feb/10/22 11:00:36 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was going to ask a different question, but listening to the minister's response to my colleague from the Bloc, I feel compelled to ask more and push him a bit further on global vaccine equity.
We know that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, the three major developers of vaccines, make about $65,000 a minute. We also know that they developed those COVID vaccines with $8 billion of public funds. We also know that the Liberal government has not agreed to the TRIPS waiver and has continued to kick that down the road. We are going into our third year of this pandemic, and the Liberal government still will not support something that would allow other countries to create their own vaccines.
Realistically, saying that none of us are done until all of us are done does not work if the Liberals are not prepared to do any of the work. Why will the government not take those very simple steps that would protect people over big pharma?
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- Feb/10/22 11:37:12 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to address my colleagues in the House of Commons today to talk about the opposition motion. I will be splitting my time with the very articulate and intelligent member for Vancouver Kingsway.
I want to start off by saying what I know we all are aware of: The actual enemy, the enemy we are all trying to fight, is COVID-19. It is not each other; it is not convoys or individuals. It is a disease. It is a global health pandemic. We know that this global health pandemic has been incredibly hard for so many people. In this place, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that people have lots their loved ones. Almost 35,000 Canadians have died, and that is 35,000 families, parents, children, brothers, sisters and friends.
Over three million Canadians have become sick, and we still do not know what the implications of that will be for the future. We are hearing some specialists say that one in four Canadians will have long-term impacts from COVID-19. Three million Canadians have been sick. That is just to date and those are just the ones we know about. It is important to remember some of these things in this place.
People's livelihoods have been deeply impacted too. In my riding of Edmonton Strathcona, a number of entrepreneurs have tried to start businesses and they have not been able to get the support they need. There are the workers and people in the artistic community. Edmonton Strathcona is the heart of the artistic community. It is where the Fringe Festival is and where the Edmonton Folk Music Festival is. All of these artists have not been able to earn an income and have not been able to do what they do for a living.
As terrible as that has been, we also need to consider what has happened to our teachers, who we are asking to go online and off-line, and consider the difficulties they have had to deal with if they have families at home they are trying to protect while also trying to protect our children. We have put an immense pressure on health care workers and other essential workers. We have an overwhelmed health care system. We have the opioid crisis and our mental health challenges. All of these things are terrible and we really do need to look at them, but we cannot lose sight of the real enemy here and the real enemy is COVID.
I understand the restrictions have been hard, but I honestly believe they have been necessary. A personal hero of mine is a doctor in Alberta named Dr. Vipond. He keeps saying that we are using the wrong word. These are not in fact restrictions; they are protections. Maybe that is how we need to look at this. Maybe that is a way we can look at this going forward, that these are protections.
We do not know how successful these protections have been. We do not know how many more people might have died if these protections had not been in place. We do not know how many more variants we would have had or how much longer we would be in COVID-19 if these protections had not been there. We know masks, smaller social gatherings, vaccinations and PPE help. All of these things make it easier for our health care systems to continue on and make it easier for us to keep our loved ones and ourselves safe.
As many members know, Alberta will be lifting all of the protections. Some of my Conservative colleagues enthusiastically cheered this earlier today. However, before people get out their “best summer ever” hats or “best spring ever” hats, I want to remind members in the House that since the best summer ever, thousands of Albertans have died. That is thousands of Albertan families that have been devastated.
Why is Alberta lifting restrictions? Alberta is lifting restrictions because a handful of angry men have blocked our border and the premier cares more about what those “truckers” think, and I use quotes very deliberately, than about the health and wellness of the people of Alberta. We have a premier who is more concerned about his polling numbers than he is about enforcing the actual laws that he put in place. Bill 1 was the first law Premier Kenney put in place. He is not interested in using it because that law was never intended to be used against people who vote for Premier Kenney. That law was intended to be used against indigenous people. That law was intended to be used against people protecting our climate.
COVID-19 does not have to be a death sentence, yet a person in Alberta is now more likely to die of COVID than heart disease, lung disease or any other single cause except old age. Why is that? In a word, it is because of politics. It is because we have a premier in Alberta who cares more about his poll numbers than about the health and well-being of Albertans.
Public health should not be subject to the whims of politicians. Public health must be guided by science and the science on COVID is very clear. Vaccines work. Masks work. Restrictions on indoor gatherings work. We should be using every tool we have to prevent the loss of life and the long-term impacts of COVID. Knowing that long COVID is with us, knowing that the impact will be with us for a long time, our health care system is going to be spending resources on COVID long after this virus is gone.
There are other solutions we can look at. I have stood up in the House many times and talked about vaccine equity. I have talked about how important it is for Canada to play a role. We all know there is no way we are going to get out of this pandemic in Canada while we fail to ensure that people around the world are able to get the vaccines and the protections they need. We know that, yet we have a government right now that refuses to donate the doses that are required.
The Liberals are proud of the fact that they have not even met the 50% mark of their promises almost three years in. They have continually failed to work with the WTO to have the TRIPS waiver signed so that countries around the world can access the recipes to make those vaccinations. It is so important to think about the fact that they do this to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical companies. These pharmaceutical companies are making tens of thousands of dollars a minute, and they developed these vaccines with public dollars.
I saw a quote yesterday on Twitter where someone made the point that having pharmaceutical companies be in charge of a vaccine rollout is the equivalent of letting oil and gas companies be in charge of climate change. Think about that for a minute. We are giving the ability to make vaccines that save people's lives to pharmaceutical companies whose entire reason for being is a profit margin.
We need the government to act more on this. We need it to change the CAMR, Canada's access to medicines regime. We need it to sign on to the TRIPS waiver. We need it to do more on COVAX, to actually care about those vaccines and care about getting them out the door. We need to support people around the world to have syringes, to have cold supply chains and to have PPE. It is not the same thing to try to vaccinate someone in a rural community in Uganda as it is to try to vaccinate someone in downtown Toronto. We need to support countries as they go through that.
In addition to what we can do around the world and the role we have to play there, we need to do more here. Our health care system in Canada has been decimated year after year. We should be having federal transfers that are 50% of the cost of health care. We do not have that anymore. That is not possible anymore.
I look at what the Conservatives are doing with this motion. They seem positively gleeful about removing all health restrictions, all the things that will ensure our ICUs can continue and all the protections for our doctors and essential workers. I try not to be cynical in this place and sometimes that is very difficult, but I do wonder: Are the Conservatives trying to destroy our health care system? Do they want to see our health care system crumble so that they can bring in the two-tiered American-style health care we have seen Jason Kenney and the UCP try to bring to Alberta?
We need to use science-based decision-making. We need to listen to experts. We need to see this pandemic as a global pandemic that requires a global solution. It is time to stop making this political. It is time to stop the empty words. It is far past time for us as parliamentarians to do the right thing for Canadians, for ourselves, for our children and for our parents.
It is way past time for us to do the right thing for people around the world.
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- Feb/10/22 11:48:06 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am deeply ashamed that the first border crossing blockade that was in place was in Coutts, Alberta, and that our premier did not stand up and shut that down. What that did was empower people to shut down Windsor and to start to protest the Ottawa airport. If we had used the tools that we had in place to say that this is infrastructure that needs to remain open, that this is for the good of our country, our province and the people in our communities, if the leader of the UCP, Jason Kenney, had actually had the bravery to do that, I do not think we would have seen these convoys on other borders. I think that folks were watching to see what the response would be from the government, and it was non-existent. It was to roll over and lift the mandates. To be honest, I hold Jason Kenney to blame for a lot of this.
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- Feb/10/22 11:50:05 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague has been a tireless advocate for the care community and for workers across this country, and I thank her for all of her efforts in that regard.
In Alberta, this is not something new for us. We have been seeing some very serious attempts to privatize large swaths of our public health care system. Right now in Alberta, for example, we regularly do not have an ambulance that is available to respond to emergencies in Edmonton, Red Deer, Calgary and many rural communities. The testing systems that we have in place are becoming privatized. So much of our health care system is under attack, and I think Canadians need to understand how dangerous that is.
I do not believe that Canadians want a two-tiered health care system. I do not believe they want an American-style system that leaves so many behind. We need to be very vigilant as we go forward to ensure that we increase our health care transfers to the provinces, that we ensure that the Canada Health Act is improved and that we have things like mental health care, pharmacare—
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- Feb/10/22 11:52:31 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague is a member of the international human rights subcommittee with me, and I look forward to working with him on many of the global issues we will be tackling in that committee.
In terms of his question, I think there is a real need for a conversation, a serious, non-political, science-based conversation, on how we reduce restrictions and protections. As we move forward, we all want to get out of COVID-19. I want my children to go back to school. I want my daughter to—
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- Feb/10/22 1:27:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague's intervention was very interesting. One of the concerns that I have, though, is that we know the protective measures put in place across the country have saved lives. It is always difficult to know how many lives have saved because, of course, prevention is prevention. We do know that those measures that have been in place have protected Canadians and saved Canadians' lives.
No health expert I have heard from is saying we should be lifting all of these protections. We have heard that we can examine them. We can look at which ones are appropriate and which ones we could ease, but no one is asking for all protections to be stopped and lifted, except the Conservative Party.
I am just wondering why Conservatives are asking for that when they are not the health experts. They are not the scientists. They are not the doctors. It does not seem very safe or reasonable, and it seems like it will cost lives.
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- Feb/10/22 1:42:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to check something. The member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes talks about the quote from Dr. Tam in which she says that she thinks we should be re-evaluating these protections. However, re-evaluation is not the same thing as lifting.
In the summer in Alberta, Jason Kenney was the very first premier to lift all the restrictions, and we saw the consequences. We saw thousands of Albertans protest against the lifting. They were afraid for their children, people under five who could not be vaccinated and people who were more prone to COVID.
How does the member come to terms with the fact that lifting all of the restrictions is maybe not what many, many Canadians would like?
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- Feb/10/22 2:49:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, over the past two years, Canadians have relied on the news more than ever for updates, health guidance and accurate information, but now members of the media are being targeted by convoys, experiencing harassment and even death threats while they work hard to keep Canadians informed. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has been practically silent. Yesterday, CTV Edmonton said that it will no longer display logos on its vehicles in order to protect its staff.
What is the government doing to protect members of the media who are so vital to Canadians and to our democracy?
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- Feb/10/22 3:12:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a point of order.
There have been discussions, and I hope that, if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent for the following motion that, in the opinion of the House, the government should do more to address global vaccine equity by sharing resources, doses and knowledge, by taking the following actions: (a) announcing its full support for a temporary waiver of the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, the TRIPS agreement, in relation to products and technologies related to the prevention, treatment or containment of COVID-19 as proposed by India and South Africa to the World Trade Organization; (b) facilitating the transfer of technology to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines around the world, including financial support for regional hubs such as the South Africa technology transfer hub; (c) following through on its own claims of the effectiveness of Canada's access to medicines regime, CAMR, by taking the necessary steps of adding COVID-19 vaccines and drugs to schedule 1 of the Patent Act; (d) donating at least 200 million doses of vaccine as promised to vulnerable populations around the world through COVAX by the end of 2022, through predictable and scheduled donations where timelines and quantities are transparently available to recipient countries and the public; (e) increasing assistance with cold chain logistics and supplies to low-income countries receiving vaccines; (f) delivering at least an additional $1.1 billion as a net addition to the international assistance envelope and existing departmental resources to address global vaccine equity in budget 2022, including $780 million to ACT-Accelerator partners to purchase vaccines, tests, treatments, personal protective equipment and oxygen in developing countries and—
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