44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 10, 2022 10:00AM
- Feb/10/22 10:57:14 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as the minister mentioned, Canada now has vaccines, therapeutics and tests. We are beyond the stage we were at in March of 2020, and in fact, we are in year three. The reality is that many restrictions are still in place as a stopgap because the government has failed to use its convening role to address a fundamentally broken health care system in Canada, where a few hundred patients can overwhelm an ICU. As well, the government needs to address the fact that it shuttered the early warning system, which left our borders in a state where it is trying to justify continued restrictions.
This motion asks the government to table a plan. It could address these two issues in it. Will the minister support this motion?
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- Feb/10/22 12:09:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Kildonan—St. Paul.
We have in front of us today a motion. The House of Commons is calling upon the federal government to table a plan to lift all federal mandates and restrictions.
What I want to do with my time today is outline why I believe the initial rationale for restrictions is perhaps no longer particularly pertinent and that there are better solutions to deal with those problems, and also outline why maintaining restrictions is coming at a sizable cost. I will then suggest some things other than restrictions that the government could be doing to address some of the challenges that we are facing.
On the first point, most restrictions in Canada were put in place to do five things: figure out what COVID was, contain COVID, give us time to get vaccines and therapeutics, incent people to get vaccinated and ensure that we had enough capacity in hospitals to deal with acute urgent-care patients.
I will run through each of those points very briefly.
First, we now know what COVID is. Sure, we need to do some research on long COVID and the impacts, and we absolutely need to make sure that we are detecting emerging variants around the world, but we know what it is and we have a good body of research on it. Therefore, I do not think that continued restrictions are giving us any gain or lead on that particular issue. Certainly the government has not presented any data to the effect that somehow continued restrictions are needed for us to conduct additional research. I would argue that would be very bad public policy.
The second thing is that the restrictions were put in place to contain COVID initially. Anybody in this House would be hard-pressed to say that COVID is containable. It is not. We are in an endemic state. Yes, there are variants that are emerging and we should be in a place to monitor those variants and communicate that to frontline professionals and ensure that our vaccines and our therapeutics are matching those, but COVID zero is not possible. In fact, many Canadians who were vaccinated have contracted the omicron variant, and so we cannot be operating in a COVID-zero situation.
The third point is that restrictions were put in place to get us vaccines and therapeutics. I am fully vaccinated and boosted. I encourage anybody who has not been vaccinated to consider getting vaccinated. Doing that is the best way to prevent severe illness from COVID.
On the fourth point, arguably—and we need to have this conversation in the House—further restrictions are not going to incent any more Canadians to get vaccinated at this point. If Canadians have not gotten vaccinated after all of these restrictions, they likely are not going to do so. Certainly the political polarization of the narrative on vaccination did not help with that cause. As my colleague from Vancouver Kingsway offered, some additional solutions we should be looking at include ways to understand why vaccine-hesitant persons are that way and then incent them in other ways, but restrictions are not going to move the needle on that any further. I have not seen any data to that effect.
The last point is to ensure that we have enough capacity in hospitals to deal with acute urgent care patients. We are in year three of COVID. If the federal government has not used its convening role to urgently bring the provinces together to say how the federal government can support additional capacity within our health care system, additional restrictions are not going to do that. It is completely unfair to ask the Canadian public to continue to restrict their movement, their freedoms and their access to certain areas because the federal government has failed to address this critical point. This has been a problem decades in the making. The pandemic laid it bare for every Canadian, and every member in this House has a duty to push the federal government to address the brokenness of our health care system, not only on behalf of all of our constituents but also for our frontline health care professionals. Let us not kid ourselves: Additional restrictions and asking Canadians to sacrifice are not going to address this issue.
If that is why restrictions were put in place and we do not need those anymore, what should we be doing? I am supporting this motion is because the government does need to provide a plan on how to fix the rest of these issues, but it cannot be through continued restrictions.
First, I call on the federal government to give us what is in the motion today: a firm plan on when all restrictions in their scope will be lifted, and that includes vaccine passports for air travellers, PCR testing requirements for international travellers and on-arrival testing. As well, I believe the government also has a duty to look at federal employees who have been dismissed because of their vaccination status.
Second, I ask the federal government to reinstate the pandemic early warning system that it shuttered, leaving Canada without a coherent system to detect emerging pathogens, and feed that into our public health system. That should have been done a long time ago. Restrictions are not going to solve that problem; only political will would get that done.
I call upon the federal government to use its convening capacity to ensure that there is a conversation among provincial governments on how we can fix the brokenness of our health care system. That should have started months ago. We should have been seeing the results of that by now. That needs to be started today. The government needs to lift the provincial governments up and ensure that we are adequately funded, and frontline health care professionals need to be leading that consultation, and not just a consultation, but an emergency plan.
I ask that the government, at all levels, recognize that it is wrong to use the removal of freedoms as a permanent fix to gloss over the brokenness of our health care system. We cannot keep saying that we should be removing freedoms to address a problem that the federal government has been loath to address. We have to move forward.
I also ask the federal government to realize that the way it has communicated information to the public over the course of the pandemic has been a disaster of epic proportions. At a time when the federal government was asking Canadians to trust implicitly in public health institutions, we had flip-flops on different advice and we had the national advisory committee on immunization suggesting one of the vaccines was not safe. At the end of the day, all that did was give fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
I have stood in the House of Commons many times and asked for the federal government to address the communication failures. That needs to happen right away. It is one thing to say, “We do not know right now, but here is what we are doing to find out.” That is the type of language that engenders trust. Going back and forth and calling people names if they are questioning why flip-flops occurred actually reduced trust in public health institutions, and that is something that needs to be immediately restored in a non-partisan way.
I ask all sides to de-escalate the rhetoric on the pandemic. Vaccination became a political wedge issue during the federal election. That has to stop. We should have been focusing on ways to understand why people were vaccine hesitant and then providing solutions to their questions and concerns, as opposed to calling them names. Conservatives always, throughout the pandemic, pushed to ensure that the government would deliver vaccines, because we understand they are a key tool in fighting COVID. However, the government chose to play politics with it.
To those who may be blockading public infrastructure today, you also have a duty of care to de-escalate your rhetoric and stand down as well. The word “rhetoric” is not the right word, and I rescind that, but certainly when it comes to blockading public infrastructure, I have opposed Occupy movements in Vancouver and Toronto. Ten years ago I opposed blockades on pipelines, and this is no different. We have to ensure that public infrastructure is accessible. That does not remove someone's right to peacefully protest, but what is happening on the Ambassador Bridge today needs to end.
I also ask the government to understand that the cost of maintaining restrictions at this point is greater than any other cost. We are seeing civil unrest and the loss of jobs, and the fact that restrictions are being used as a band-aid to deal with some of these larger problems is actually making things worse in the country. We have to move forward.
I have two more quick points. I would suggest that the government should have an emergency committee of Parliament that is all-partisan to figure this out. We should be doing that immediately and getting to solutions on some of these bigger issues. We should also be ensuring that we have vaccine production in this country. We still do not have adequate vaccine supply production.
There are so many things that the government could be doing. That is why we are asking for a plan and for restrictions to end. I would hope that all colleagues in this House understand that restrictions will not fix these problems in and of themselves, and they need to stop.
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- Feb/10/22 12:20:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I find it unfortunate that my colleague will not commit to coming up with a plan to lift restrictions. I mean, this is probably the most serious issue our Parliament has been faced with in a generation, and today that type of a question is not going to address any of the issues I brought forward. He did not comment on any of the proactive solutions I suggested.
Give your head a shake—not you, Mr. Speaker, but my colleague across the way.
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- Feb/10/22 12:21:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am having a sense of déjà vu, because it was basically a year ago when we all stood in this House and debated whether we should have a plan to end restrictions.
A plan to end restrictions is not saying that we do not want Canadians to be healthy and safe. What we are saying is that the impositions on Canadian freedoms and the impacts on our economy and on our mental health as a country are things that need to be weighed in the course of public policy, and right now, those costs are too high. That plan needs to ensure that we have input from average Canadians so that people who are sitting in corner offices or working at home on laptops are not the only ones providing that information. Yes, it needs to be science-driven, but it also needs to be driven by a population that is tired and fatigued and wants hope. The end goal has to be to end the restrictions.
We cannot solve these problems with restrictions any more. We need better public policy. We need to end the poor choice of restrictions. They should have never been normalized and they should never actually be normalized as ways to solve these larger systemic issues. They need to stop, and we need better solutions.
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- Feb/10/22 12:24:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I believe that public health restrictions should be informing our decisions as legislators. At the end of the day, we are charged with making these decisions, as are the ministers, and public health officials cannot make these decisions for us. Their opinions can inform our decisions but not make them for us, right?
As for the second thing, hospitalizations, we are in year three of COVID and we have not figured out how to fundamentally fix what happens when there are an extra 300 people in a hospital in a certain area, rather than continuing with lockdowns. We cannot continue this way. Our health care system needs to be reformed. We cannot expect society to shut down every time we have a surge of health care patients. That is just the reality. We are beyond that. If we do not get this, we are never going to fix Canada's health care system. It is going to be a tough conversation and we do have to de-escalate the rhetoric in it, but I have to say that the restrictions are not going to fix that.
I will close with this: I encourage anybody who has not gotten vaccinated yet to do so, but continued restrictions are not going to change their mind after six months. We have to look at other ways to incent people to get vaccinated, and we have to fix our health care system.
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