44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 14, 2022 11:00AM
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 have a point of order. I really hope that I misheard my colleague in his description of the quarantine hotels. As someone who has been helping put forward a motion on gender-based violence, if it was referred to as a “rape hotel”, I find that profoundly offensive to women not only in the House but in this country. I would ask that the member apologize.
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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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