44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 24, 2022 10:00AM
moved for leave to introduce Bill C-260, An Act relating to cash contributions by Canada and to criteria and conditions in respect of post-secondary education.
She said: Mr. Speaker, it is my great privilege to table this bill on behalf of residents of Edmonton Strathcona and on behalf of all Canadians who recognize the value and importance of quality, accessible post-secondary education in this country. I want to thank my colleague, the member for Edmonton Griesbach, for seconding my bill today.
Post-secondary education is key to growing our economy and to positioning Canada as a knowledge leader in the 21st century. However, successive governments over the past two decades have failed to make post-secondary education a priority.
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- Mar/24/22 10:05:15 a.m.
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Over that time, federal support for post-secondary education has declined over 40% and, not surprisingly, student debt has risen 40%. Declining federal and provincial funding for post-secondary education means higher tuition costs, the corporatization of universities and colleges, the outsourcing of academic and support labour and lower-quality education, and it is putting academic institutions in our country at risk of failure.
It is time for the federal government to be a real partner in post-secondary education again. This bill, the Canada post-secondary education act, would create a financial transfer for post-secondary education and would impose qualifying criteria that provinces must meet in order to receive federal funding, including limiting the use of short-term contracts and casual labour and ensuring affordability for students.
Students, faculty and staff deserve better from our government. I urge my fellow parliamentarians to support the Canada post-secondary education act for all Canadians.
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- Mar/24/22 10:55:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, so far, the BA.2 subvariant has led to a significant increase in cases in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and other countries around the world. Hong Kong has the highest mortality rate in the world. South Korea is seeing a record number of cases.
My question is as follows: Does the hon. member believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is over?
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- Mar/24/22 11:53:12 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time today with the member for Vancouver Kingsway.
It is my great honour, as always, to stand in this place and address my colleagues, and I want to start by acknowledging something that I know we all know. We all know how difficult COVID-19 has been on us. We all know how hard it has been on children and we all know how hard it has been on parents and families. I am a mother myself, and to see my teenage children missing parts of their childhood and parts of their teenage years has been very hard. To be trapped in a house with a very active 14-year-old boy is not easy for any of us, and I sympathize with families across the country and around the world that have had to deal with that.
This pandemic has been very difficult on people's livelihoods and on businesses too. There are businesses in my riding that started right before the pandemic and could not access supports throughout this pandemic, and it has been heartbreaking to see that. We have seen the impacts on women, and not just women in Canada but women around the world, who have been set back decades by what has happened during this pandemic.
Of course, my heart breaks for the people who have lost their lives and for the families that have lost children, mothers, fathers, brothers or sisters. My heart breaks for them. In my province of Alberta, over 4,000 people died. That is 4,000 families. That is a massive impact in a province like Alberta.
When I think of all of these things and our best way forward and the best way we can work together to come out of COVID-19, what I keep thinking is that we cannot and we must not ever politicize something like a global health pandemic. We must listen to science. We must listen to medical professionals. I am not a doctor; that is not my role in this pandemic. My role will be to listen to doctors, to listen to scientists and to listen to experts. What I know is that experts are telling me that COVID-19 is not over.
I do want COVID-19 to be over. That is fine. However, that is not how global health pandemics work. It is not over. We have numbers spiking around the world. We have numbers spiking in places as far away as South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The numbers are climbing; the variants are developing.
I am going to talk today a bit about the need to have a global response. I do not think anyone in this place will be surprised that vaccine equity is one thing that is vitally important to me and a tool we need to use. I also want to talk a bit about what results when we politicize this pandemic, and I am going to use my province as the example for that.
Members all heard the Premier of Alberta tell us that last summer was going to be the best summer ever. My premier went so far as to print hats that said, “Best summer ever”. Do members know what it became instead? It was a cautionary tale for provinces and countries around the world. We know what happens when COVID-19 is politicized. All we have to do is look at Alberta.
Albertans have been hit hard by COVID-19, and when the premier's poll numbers were hit just as hard by his terrible decisions, he decided to do the wrong thing. He decided to politicize COVID-19. He put politics, or in this case his own political survival, ahead of the interests of Albertans. He said, “influenza...does not generally threaten life apart from the elderly and the immunocompromised”. He said it is a flu. He mimicked Donald Trump's lines and even pushed ineffective and potentially dangerous treatments.
During the third wave of COVID-19, Alberta had one of the highest infection rates in Canada. It had one of the highest infection rates in the world. This is what happens when we politicize this.
I also want to talk about an idea. I think all of us in here could recognize, at least intellectually, that if we want a global health pandemic to be over, we need to have a global response. We need to make sure vaccines are available for everyone. We cannot have a motion that asks us to ignore science and thinks that is a reasonable response to the global health pandemic.
What I would have liked to see is the Conservative Party bring forward a motion that said something like, let us update our Canadian access to medicines regime to include COVID-19 medications. Let us work together to make sure that Canada is playing an active role in waiving intellectual property rights so that countries around the world can produce their own vaccines for their own populations, and let us work with countries around the world to help with vaccine hesitancy, to make sure that when vaccines are delivered, there are supply chains, there are syringes and there are all those things that need to happen so that people can actually get vaccinated.
I would have loved, and would have been so supportive of, a Conservative motion that called for the Canadian government to finally live up to its obligations to deliver the promised doses to COVAX. COVAX is a system that was supposed to ensure that the world was vaccinated. However, that system does not work when countries such as Canada have bilateral agreements and take all of the vaccine stock, and leave countries that desperately need doses to vaccinate their health care workers and their vulnerable populations with none.
This is the opposite of a good global health response. This is the opposite of what we need to do. I have to say that I look at our response to COVID-19, and I think to myself: We face a global challenge with Ukraine. We face a fundamental global challenge with climate change, and our global responses have not lived up to that task. I worry that these are showing us what a global response will look like in the future for other challenges.
I am not a virologist. I am not an epidemiologist. I am not a physician. I am pretty sure there are few of us in this chamber who are. This motion that has been brought forward is asking us to be all of those things. It turns what should be a scientific decision into a political decision, and that is wrong. It is not up to us to make scientific decisions. It must never be our role to make scientific decisions. Our job is to develop policy and legislation that is in the best interests of Canadians.
In my province of Alberta, we have lost more than 4,000 people, and we are going to lose more. Yesterday we had 500 more cases reported, and variants continue to threaten us. Until we are able to vaccinate the world, and until Canada does its part to vaccinate the world, including by signing the TRIPS waiver, the virus is going to continue to evolve, and variants are going to continue to plague the world, including our country of Canada.
This motion asks us to give up the hope that we will get through this pandemic. This motion asks us to give up our fight against this virus. It asks us to surrender. It asks us to ignore public health and science. It asks us to pretend to know better than scientists. Canadians are better than this. We care about science. We are not about to surrender at the end. We are going to continue to care for one another.
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- Mar/24/22 12:04:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for the question. We often see eye to eye as neighbours and members of Parliament for the wonderful city of Edmonton, but I have to say that my perception of where my constituents are on this is very different from what the member brought forward.
I am getting many emails from people who are deeply worried about those who cannot receive a vaccination, such as children. I am hearing from teachers who are absolutely terrified to be back in classrooms that have not dealt with the ventilation problems that we have had so far and that have not dealt with overcrowding. I am talking to health care workers who are exhausted. They are on their last straw, and hearing that the Government of Alberta does not care enough about them to maintain some of these restrictions that will keep them safe is heartbreaking. I am hearing about seniors who are worried about their own care.
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- Mar/24/22 12:06:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, like my colleague, I also feel that we have, as a Parliament, tried to work together for the betterment of Canada and for Canadians.
It is not always easy decisions that parliamentarians are asked to make. Our constituents did not send us here to have the honour of representing them in this place to do cheerleading for them or to do the popular things. We are here to make the difficult decisions, and there are things that we could have done much better. A perfect example of that is the Canadian access to medicines regime, CAMR, which I talked about earlier. We could put those medicines, those therapeutics and vaccination medicines on that list, but we have not done that yet. The Canadian government has the opportunity and could do it today. That would be one way that we could work together.
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- Mar/24/22 12:07:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I think that a plan is very important. Canadians deserve to have answers and they deserve to get information, but in my mind what that might look like is a plan to actually review the mandates: to look at them and see which ones can be lifted and at what point. To have that research into that piece is really important. However, it cannot be a decision that is based on what the member wants or what I want, but rather on what scientists and medical professionals tell us.
I would very quickly add that it is very important that our health care system is strengthened, which is another thing that I think all of us in the House should be fighting for.
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- Mar/24/22 12:50:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for St. Albert—Edmonton today spoke a lot during his speech about the obligations we have to Canadians and the freedoms that Canadians are entitled to. I want to read to him what Dr. Katharine Smart, who is the CMA president, had to say.
She said, “While governments and Canadians are hoping to move past the pandemic, an exhausted, depleted health workforce is struggling to provide timely, necessary care to patients and make progress through a significant backlog of tests, surgeries and regular care.”
My question for the member is this: What do we owe our health care professionals, who have stood on the front line and worked so hard? Do we not owe them that? Further, in addition to protecting our health care workers, I would ask the member whether or not he would be supportive of increasing the health transfers to provinces, as the premiers have all asked for, to 35%. Would he be supportive of that?
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