44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 14, 2022 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I have a number of petitions to present today.
The first petition is in support of Bill S-223. This bill seeks to combat forced organ harvesting and trafficking. It would make it a criminal offence for a Canadian to go abroad to receive an organ without the consent of the person giving the organ. Petitioners are hoping that this is the Parliament that finally gets this done. This bill has passed the Senate unanimously three times and has been supported by MPs from multiple parties going back over 13 years. We hope this time we get it done.
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- Feb/14/22 3:33:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the third petition I am presenting is on behalf of constituents living in the towns of Fox Creek and Swan Hills. These two towns are located in my riding in northern Alberta. The petitioners recognize that there are extended travel times and heating costs. Swan Hills is a town with one of the highest elevations in Canada. Constituents are asking for the arbitrary geographical line that runs across Alberta to be lowered so the residents of Fox Creek and Swan Hills can both access the prescribed intermediate zone tax relief that is available to folks living in northern regions.
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- Feb/14/22 3:33:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the final petition I have today is from people from across Canada who are concerned about the politicization and revocation of charitable status for folks who hold to a pro-life view. They are concerned that this is a politicization of the charitable tax code and want to ensure that the charitable tax code does not become politicized. These people are also concerned about the 300 babies who die every day due to abortion. They want to ensure that Canada remains resolved to bring an end to this practice.
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- Feb/14/22 3:33:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the second petition I have today is on the ongoing Beijing Olympics. Canadians want to ensure that parliamentarians remain focused on the Chinese Communist Party's accountability for its human rights record. The case of Peng Shuai reminds us of how the athletes themselves are also vulnerable to acts of oppression and violence by the Communist Party. Polls show that seven out of 10 Canadians are worried about the health and safety of Canadian athletes. The signatories of this petition want to see the Government of Canada take stronger action regarding the Communist Party's human rights abuses, particularly recognizing the treatment of the Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition I have speaks directly to Bill C-230, the protection of freedom of conscience act, which is moved by my colleague, the member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek.
The petitioners from across Canada are concerned about doctors and health care professionals who might be coerced to engage in support of euthanasia or MAID, as they want conscience rights or second opinions to be protected. The petitioners note that doctors deserve freedom of conscience and note how the Canadian Medical Association confirmed that conscience protections would not limit access to assisted suicide. The petitioners are calling upon Parliament to enshrine in the Criminal Code the protection of conscience rights for physicians and health care workers from coercion or intimidation to provide or refer assisted suicide or euthanasia.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the things we see over and over again from the Liberals is that their measurement of success is how much money they have spent. They do not go back to the raw details about what actually happened. Here, again, we see a big dollar number. They are promising to spend a huge amount on rapid tests. It seems to me that this is a bit late and after the fact given that we have been calling for rapid tests for almost two years. Now, in the dying days of the pandemic, rolling out rapid testing does not seem like a good use of funds. I wonder if the hon. member has any comments on that.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to indulge my hon. colleague from the other side to keep this on point. Probably the most baffling thing to me is why we even have a programming motion on this particular bill. We raised the issue of rapid testing and having rapid tests nearly two years ago, in April of 2020.
Today we are bringing this up, and there suddenly seems to be a mad panic for rapid tests. We have been calling for rapid tests for nearly two years. Something has not significantly changed, in my mind, that suddenly today, of all days, rapid tests should be the thing we talk about in this place.
There are a host of other things going on in this place that we perhaps should be talking about, but here we are talking about a programming motion on a bill to approve rapid tests.
Could the member please explain to me what the issue is with the rapid tests that makes this so important today?
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. colleague from Vancouver for his great speech here tonight. One of the things folks back home are wondering about is the Liberal-NDP coalition that we seem to have in this place. I wonder if he could give his thoughts as to why he voted against our opposition day motion that we voted on earlier today.
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Mr. Speaker, I was wondering if the hon. member could comment on the apparent NDP-Liberal coalition we have going on here and the vote we had earlier today on our opposition day motion, in which the NDP supported the Liberal government and voted against that motion.
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Mr. Speaker, it is not often we get to go twice in a debate like this, so I am appreciative of that.
The hon. member talked about the science of this. The motion we put forward last week called for the government to put forward a plan, give us some benchmarks or give us some timelines, and show us the science of when we will break out of this pandemic and when we will be able to lift the mandates.
Would the hon. member like to tell us, according to her plan, how many people would have to be vaccinated in her ideal world for the mandates to be dropped and for life to return to some semblance of normal?
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Mr. Speaker, two weeks to flatten the curve, do we remember that being said? Two weeks to flatten the curve is what we all signed up for around here back in the spring of 2020, two years ago.
Here we are two years later and we still do not have a plan for how we are going to pull out of this pandemic. We put forward a motion last week calling on the government to provide us with a plan. We left it fairly wide open. We asked for a plan for how we would end the mandates and return to some semblance of normal.
The Liberals joined with their coalition partners, the NDP, and voted that motion down, so here we are without a plan for how to end the pandemic. We heard about the vaccines and we called for rapid tests, which is what we are talking about tonight, but here we are without a plan.
The Liberals could have voted for our motion earlier today and could have put forward a plan. We gave them a month to come up with a plan. They have essentially had two years to come up with a plan, and one of the major frustrations from people across the country is that there does not seem to be a plan. We seem to be flying by the seat of our pants.
There is also no humility in this to say that the government actually does not know. That would be an acceptable plan to give, but the government keeps saying it is following the science. Show us the science. Use the science and build a plan. Give us a percentage. We have heard things like “when 70% of the population is vaccinated”, “when 80% of the population is vaccinated” or “when 90% of the population is vaccinated”. Those are all nice targets, but that is kind of like shooting a hole in the target and then painting the bull's eye around the hole we just shot.
If we do not know what the target is, it is pretty hard to have a plan. It is hard to have an idea. As well, the goalposts keep changing. The target keeps changing. The bullet hole is there and we have painted the bull's eye around it. That is essentially where we are at with this whole COVID-19 pandemic.
It has been two years. We have seen jurisdictions around the world removing their vaccination mandates, removing their travel restrictions and opening up their sports arenas. They are watching hockey again and having a good time. Here we are in Canada behind plexiglass and masks and all of these things while other parts of the world are—
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Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that we have given the government the opportunity with this motion last week for a dramatic out, a way to reduce the pressure in this country around the two years that this country has been under moving goalposts and shooting first and then drawing a bullseye on the target after the fact. Here we are today asking the government for a target before we get to the plate.
Today, the bill before us is very straightforward. It talks about getting rapid tests. We have been asking for rapid tests for over two years. We were asking for rapid tests before there was a decent vaccine on the market, before we had approvals for the vaccine. Why? There were cutting-edge Canadian companies that were showing up in this place and telling us they had a rapid test that we could use if only they could get Health Canada's approval.
I remember writing a letter asking the health minister to expedite the testing of these rapid tests so that we could use them. Why? It was so that we could maintain our border. One of the first things that we learned in a pandemic was to shut the borders and try to keep the pandemic out. What did the government do? It called shutting the border racist. Had we had rapid tests at the border, we could have tested people and significantly reduced the effects of people coming from overseas and bringing COVID-19 here. We would have been able to quarantine the sick rather than quarantining everybody. Quarantining is for the sick. It is not for the healthy.
That was one of the major frustrations that we saw, these ham-fisted practices that went on, putting people in these “rape hotels” across the country after they came in to ensure that they were not spreading COVID to other people, in worse conditions than many of the prisons in this country, worse food for sure. Forgive me when I am not willing to grant the Liberals a lot of leeway on this bill around rapid tests when we have been calling for them for a very long time.
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Mr. Speaker, I will rephrase that. I apologize for any offence I may have given.
I will rephrase that. We placed returning visitors to Canada in places where there was no gender-based analysis done upon their return to Canada. We heard horrific stories of things that happened in those places. I am adamant that one of the things we could have used to prevent people from ending up in those quarantine hotels was rapid tests. Rapid tests were one of the ways that we could have reduced the influx of COVID into our own country, and it was one of the ways we could have managed the border. Those were things that we called for early on, very early on.
Other things that we have seen with this pandemic is the mismanagement of our PPE stockpile. After SARS there was an effort in this country to stockpile PPE. In 2017, those stockpiles were no longer funded. They were in disarray. They were not managed. There we were when 2020 came around and we had a pandemic but we did not have a stockpile of PPE. That goes to show that I do not have faith in the Liberal government's ability to manage vast numbers of these products.
The other thing that we are concerned about with this particular $2.5-billion bill is who is going to supply these particular rapid tests. I have already talked significantly about rapid test companies that have approached my office. They probably approached every member's office in this place, showed the tests and said, “Hey, we are a Canadian company. We are a cutting-edge, health technology company in this country and we think we've developed a rapid test for COVID.” That was early on in 2020. We said, “Okay, this is great. We will put it forward and promote it” and those kinds of things, yet we never saw them get approved. I do not know. They went to the United States and other jurisdictions and those same rapid tests were approved in those jurisdictions, but they were not approved in ours.
Then we saw similar things happen with vaccines. We saw the Government of Canada sign up with a company called CanSino. It spent millions of dollars on that particular project, only to abandon it later. Never mind the Baylis Medical fiasco. I am not sure if colleagues remember that one. Ventilators that were not approved by Health Canada were bought. Several thousand of them were bought by the Canadian government to be stockpiled for the pandemic. I do not begrudge that, but there was a member of Parliament named Frank Baylis who happened to be associated with Baylis Medical. Somehow that company got this multi-million dollar contract to provide ventilators to fight the pandemic. There are multiple examples of why we would have questions about the suppliers of the rapid tests. Never mind the WE scandal. In the middle of the pandemic, we had the WE scandal where the Prime Minister was trying to give his buddies nearly a billion dollars.
Here we are with a $2.5-billion new spending bill and we have questions about who will be the suppliers. We have seen this movie played before. We have watched it. We had the WE scandal. We had the CanSino disaster. We had the Baylis Medical thing. We have seen that.
Other countries around the world, though, have had a great record with rapid tests. Germany, for example, adopted rapid tests very early on and have used them extensively.
Here we are at the last minute, in what are, I hope, the dying days of this pandemic, and suddenly we are rushing the bill through Parliament. We are not sending the bill to committee. We are just rushing it through Parliament, and for what? I am not exactly certain why. Is it to distract from the Liberals' disastrous vote for a plan to end the mandates? Is it because they are embarrassed about that and want to hide from it, so they put this on the table and then tell us to jump through all the hoops?
It is still Monday, the first day of the week, although it may be getting close to Tuesday, and the Liberals brought this to Parliament, out of all the things we have to be concerned about today, never mind the special Emergencies Act and things like that going on. Suddenly, after two years of asking for this, today of all days, here we are having to ram this through, and we are not using the normal means of Parliament, but a programming motion to ram this through Parliament to bring it to the Senate, which is not sitting for another week. The committee could hear it, sit down and ask questions of the government specifically, such as who the suppliers are and where the money is going. Let us get a schedule of where the $2.5 billion is being spent and let us have a plan. Perhaps somebody on the Liberal side can explain to me why, today of all days, suddenly this bill has to be debated and programmed through and have multiple votes on it.
I would like to congratulate the clerk for her amazing ability to remember all of our names for those. Even though, because of the COVID rules, I sat in different seats today, she still managed to get my name right. I congratulate her on that.
Nonetheless, it still begs the question: Why today? What was the science that brought us to today? Fundamentally, I think rapid tests are important, were important, and would have been a real help in the fight against COVID early on.
I know that my own province of Alberta was using rapid tests. They were handed out at school and my kids took them home. We very much enjoyed having rapid tests to be able to have that peace of mind. However, there is no recording of those rapid tests. There is no data collection. They are used, and they give me and my family peace of mind, but then they go in the garbage. There is no data collection. They are an incredible tool for individuals to use, but not beyond that.
We have heard members on the other side talking about collecting the data and all these kinds of things, and that is great, but if a person is self-administering it, there really is no data collection, unless there are some digital ones that I do not know about. The ones that I have used are analog outfits that do not collect data and do not have a time-stamp on them. They are good for my own personal peace of mind, but not necessarily useful in tracking and tracing.
It would have been useful for going to events, crossing borders and those kinds of things. They would have been extremely useful two years ago. Here again, we see that the Liberals are a day late, and seem to have another reason for bringing this forward today other than them being concerned about rapid tests, which is newfound from my perspective.
I am thankful for the opportunity to speak this evening, and I hope that I have laid out the reasons why rapid tests are important and the Liberal failure to bring forward rapid tests in a timely manner.
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Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the member's story about rapid tests. It is too bad we did not have them two years ago. We could have managed COVID much better. That was kind of the entire thrust of my speech.
Rapid tests would have been an immense tool to help stop the entry of COVID into our country. I am frustrated. Here we are, at this late hour in the pandemic, and finally the Liberals have had their “come to Jesus” moment and are now willing to talk about rapid tests.
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Mr. Speaker, I think that vaccines are an important tool in the fight against COVID.
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Mr. Speaker, the member seems to have confirmed my suspicions of an NDP-Liberal coalition.
Nonetheless, I would go back to my analogy of shooting a hole in the target and then painting the bull's eye around it after the fact. If we do not set a target, how do we know when we have met it? We do not have a list of steps we need to take in order to end the mandates, to reopen the economy, to reopen the border, to lift the travel restrictions and to lift the testing when we travel. If we do not set those parameters before we get there, how do we know if we have actually met a target? How can we measure if we have no solid point to measure from?
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Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River for the bill he has put forward calling on companies to have to report their supply chains, to ensure that forced labour and slave labour are not found in Canadian supply chains.
One of the interesting things that people note and point out, and that I have been trying to promote, is that the federal government is not necessarily held to the same standard. The government has been caught flat-footed, in terms of procuring PPE and other items during the pandemic, and it is rumoured that forced labour had been used to produce those things. To the Liberals' credit, the minister has worked fairly diligently recently to correct some of those issues.
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Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague could not have summed it up better. There are big trust issues in this country with our institutions and with the way the government has operated. We have heard right from the mouths of Liberal MPs how the government has used the pandemic and vaccines to divide and drive wedges between Canadians.
Rapid tests were something Conservatives called for early on. They are not a replacement for vaccines, but an alternative to things the government brought in to mandate vaccines or encourage vaccination. Rapid tests were also more widely available early on than vaccines. They took less time to build and to test, and they are not nearly as invasive as a vaccine. There would have been widespread adoption very early on and they were something we called for, but that seemed to have been ignored while the government put all of its eggs in the vaccine basket.
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