44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 24, 2022 10:00AM
- Mar/24/22 4:03:21 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise in this place to speak to our Conservative opposition day motion, introduced by my colleague from Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.
The motion reads:
That, given that Canada has one of the world's highest vaccination rates and every province across Canada has lifted or has a plan to lift vaccine mandates, the House call on the government to immediately lift all federal vaccine mandates in order to:
(a) protect the jobs of federally regulated employees;
(b) enable Canadians to travel unimpeded;
(c) ensure Canada's tourism industry recovery; and
(d) allow for the free flow of goods across the Canadian border.
This is a motion that I agree with, and it is a motion that is particularly relevant for constituents in my beautiful riding of Niagara Falls, which includes the city of Niagara Falls and the towns of Niagara-on-the-Lake and Fort Erie.
As members of the House may know, my riding is Canada's top leisure tourism destination in all of Canada. It is also home to four international bridge crossings that connect Canada to the United States. Before the pandemic, tourism generated $2.4 billion in receipts in Niagara alone, and the local tourism sector employed 40,000 Niagara residents. These numbers were record highs in 2019, and they were followed by record lows a year later, as the world entered lockdown in 2020 to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we all know, the Canadian travel and tourism industry was hit first, was hit the hardest and will take the longest to recover from this pandemic. Before COVID, Canada's national tourism industry employed one in 10 Canadians and was a $105-billion industry. Today, we are at just 50% of where we were in 2019, and forecasting does not see recovery being achieved until at least the end of 2025.
For the sake of supporting Canada's travel and tourism industry, we need to get back to the days of 2019, and we need to do so in a safe and responsible way, following what the data and the science is now telling us. That is why I have been encouraged by the remarks of some of Canada's top doctors in this regard.
On February 18 of this year, CTV News reported Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's chief public health officer, saying, “We should be able to manage the pandemic going into the future without, I think, some of the more stringent or restrictive public health measures”. Meanwhile, the day before Dr. Tam's statement, Global News reported Dr. Kieran Moore saying, “We do think the highest risk is behind us, that we’re heading into a lower risk environment, and that the need for vaccination policies across Ontario sectors, whether it’s health, or in colleges and universities, is no longer necessary”.
Many of my constituents cannot afford to lose a third consecutive summer tourism season, whether they own and operate a tourism-related business or they are workers whose jobs depend on tourism visitation to our region. We are more than two years into this pandemic, and Canadians simply want a return to their normal lives.
For many months now, Canada's Conservatives, myself included, have been calling on the federal government to present a plan on how we get out of this pandemic and achieve recovery. While provinces and territories are beginning to reverse their policies and expect to have all of their policies fully reversed by the end of April, we continue to see reluctance and hesitation from the federal government to do the same in areas of its jurisdiction.
For a long time, Canada's Conservatives have called on this federal government to eliminate all predeparture testing requirements for fully vaccinated travellers. That is why we welcomed the news when the federal government finally made its recent announcement to do just that. However, it is not enough to leave it at that. We need the federal government to do more and to do so more quickly if we are going to have a strong summer tourism season in Niagara. At this delicate and critical time, international travellers are planning their summer vacations. Our jobs as a Parliament and the job of this government is to make it easy for international travellers to choose Canada as their summer tourism destination.
This year, the ArriveCAN app has been anything but easy for travellers since its implementation. Just today, I received correspondence from the general manager of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Peace Bridge Authority who wrote, “The continued mandatory use of the ArriveCAN app will result in much longer processing times and very lengthy border wait times, which will significantly depress cross-border traffic at a time when we are moving into the 2022 summer tourist season.” He further indicated, “Border delays discourage cross-border travel, and that will continue to adversely impact hard-hit tourism industries in the Niagara region that are trying to recover from two years of pandemic-related border restrictions.”
These continued federal barriers harm Canada's reputation as a travel destination, and our country continues to be perceived by international travellers as a destination that is too complicated to travel to. We need the federal government to be an international champion for Canadian travel and tourism again.
Our motion today is asking the federal government to lift all federal vaccine mandates so our country can fully reopen. This would not only benefit trade, travel and tourism, but would also address federally regulated workers who may or may not be vaccinated for whatever their personal reasons.
The government's job, and our job as parliamentarians, is to give Canadians the tools they need so they can make decisions about their own health care choices and well-being. Tools create choice, and I believe in giving Canadians a choice on this important matter. Given the high vaccination rates, millions upon millions of Canadians have chosen to get vaccinated. It is an approach that I and many of my parliamentary colleagues have encouraged since the early days of this pandemic.
My support for vaccines remains steadfast. I am triple-vaccinated. My wife is a public health nurse, and she has worked at our local vaccination clinics. Having said that, the government has no right to decide an individual's health choice. Federally regulated workers, including frontline workers such as our Canadian Armed Forces members, CBSA officers and health care workers, should never have been forced into an ultimatum by the Liberal government of having to choose between getting vaccinated and getting fired, nor should Canadians have been denied the right to travel freely in their own country to visit loved ones who, for example, may have lived in other provinces.
Tools exist to give Canadians choices about their health care and to help us adapt to living with COVID. For example, rapid testing is one such tool. Why is it that the House only recently authorized the spending of $2.5 billion on rapid tests? We should have done that a year and a half ago, as Canada's Conservatives have been calling for the use of these important tools.
All Canadians deserve a federal government that is here to serve and protect its citizens and our national best interests. That means it does not matter what our political party is, where we live in this country, what faith we follow or what our vaccination status is. The duty of government and of everyone here is to work so that we bring people together to find solutions that are in the best interests of all Canadians.
Our economy should be fully reopened and recovered from this pandemic by now. For two years, Canadians have done their part. It is now time for the current federal government to hold up its end of the bargain and lift all federal vaccine mandates in Canada. I will be supporting this motion, and I hope my parliamentary colleagues will do so as well.
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- Mar/24/22 4:12:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, what should be disturbing to this new NDP-Liberal coalition government is the funding that is required through the COVAX program. The federal government should be ashamed that it actually took money and vaccines from that program that should be going to those countries that need it most, so that they can get vaccinated, so that we can provide assistance to them and so that we can avoid situations with continued growth of variants that continue to emerge throughout the world.
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- Mar/24/22 4:13:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have asked consistently. Last year, we had a motion before the House asking for a plan to be put forward to end the restrictions and the mandates. We have done so again, and we continue to be told no by the government and its supporters in its coalition.
We need a plan to get out of COVID. The people of Niagara Falls, those tourism workers, simply want to go back to work. They want to get back to their jobs. They want to welcome those millions of visitors who come to our community and make it the vibrant tourism community that it is. That is being denied by COVID, and we need to get back to those days.
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- Mar/24/22 4:15:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to say the member's riding is just as wonderful and beautiful as mine from a tourism perspective, but mine is the number one tourism destination in all of Canada. Let us not forget that.
I would like to reiterate that the government has taken vaccines from that COVAX program, and that is something that is abhorrent. What we need to be doing is supporting those countries in order to prevent variants from coming forward again, so people can get vaccinated and so we can prevent the spread of COVID-19. What the government did was deny that from happening. That is my response to that question.
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- Mar/24/22 4:16:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will just reiterate the comments of Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Tam. On February 18, she said, “We should be able to manage the pandemic going into the future without, I think, some of the more stringent or restrictive public health measures.”
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