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Mr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC)

Mar/24/22 10:42:12 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what a great presentation by our colleague, the official opposition health critic. This excellent presentation illustrates how well the official opposition has been doing its job here in the House for weeks and months now, by calling for one simple thing: a plan for lifting federal health measures. We started off by asking questions, asking whether the Liberals could provide Canadians with any dates, a path forward, or any hope that these measures would be lifted. From across the way, we got answers filled with statistics, case numbers and vaccination rates. We were told that the situation was worse here than anywhere else or, alternatively, that it was less bad. We got all sorts of answers except for the answer to our question. We wanted a plan with dates, and we wanted to know what criteria the government would set and evaluate for determining the end of the federal health measures. It is always the same thing with the Liberals. We are always wondering when they are going to take action. At the start of the pandemic, they were behind the curve. They were late realizing that there was a pandemic. They were late purchasing vaccines in the beginning. They were lagging behind on just about everything. Now that the provinces are starting to lift health restrictions, the Liberal government is once again lagging behind. It is lagging behind the science and the decisions of the provinces and also of other countries. The NDP-Liberal government is incapable of making decisions at the right time. Who is paying for the price? All Canadians. The fact that we are talking about this again today demonstrates that this government is incapable of taking action, and that it does not care about its own employees, its officials, the country's economy, cross-border trade, the tourism industry or all the federally regulated workers across Canada. All that is no big deal for the government. It has become clear since Monday that this NDP-Liberal Prime Minister had other things in mind than lifting health restrictions in this country. In the current context, how can this NDP-Liberal Prime Minister justify keeping the restrictions in place while the provinces are systematically lifting them? We have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, because Canadians have stepped up and gotten vaccinated. I would remind members that at the beginning of the pandemic, no one knew anything about this disease. Science stepped up, and people stepped up by getting vaccinated in huge numbers. I commend all Canadians who did so, all the health care workers who worked so hard in such uncertain times when we did not know what we were dealing with, and everyone who worked on the front lines to be there for Canadians and ensure their health and safety. The situation has changed in two years. I know that the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister likes to live in the past, but a lot of things have changed. For the first time in two years, Canadians have hope that life can get back to normal. Why does the Prime Minister insist on contradicting the experts? That is the real question. We do not have an answer to that. Why does this NDP-Liberal Prime Minister not want to listen to the experts? Why is he not doing what his provincial counterparts are doing? Does the Prime Minister now think that he is more important than the scientists whose recommendations he claimed to be following throughout the pandemic? Now, it is no big deal if he does not listen to scientists. As my health critic colleague was saying, the Prime Minister is following political science, not medical science. That is what we are now realizing. He was unable to win the majority of Canadians' votes by calling an election in the midst of a pandemic. No one wanted an election, but he chose to do what he pleased and call an election anyway. It was no big deal, even if it broke some of the rules. He absolutely had to do it. He wanted his government to win a majority to lead the country. He did not succeed. Canadians were clear. They told him no. What did the Prime Minister do? He bought a majority in Parliament through a coalition with the NDP. That was his response. That is what he has been spending the past weeks and months doing instead of thinking about public servants, Canadians and all those who are unable to do their jobs because the federal government decided to maintain vaccine mandates, which are no longer needed, according to the public health experts of all the provinces and many other experts around the world. Speaking of experts, Quebec's health minister recently said that they were working towards lifting restrictions and that we need to learn to live with the virus. That is what the Liberals should be focusing on. I am not the only one saying this. Two medical experts told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health that there was limited scientific basis for vaccine mandates. Dr. David Jacobs, the president of the Ontario Association of Radiologists, spoke about the immature actions of the Prime Minister of Canada, which is not nothing, and about how he added fuel to the fire when he called unvaccinated people a fringe minority and racists. Those words are not becoming of the Prime Minister of Canada, or, I should say, the NDP‑Liberal Prime Minister of Canada. According to Dr. Jacobs, unvaccinated Canadians are people who are just simply afraid or who have looked at the research and disagree with the findings. He was essentially saying that one would expect the Prime Minister to be more open-minded. Dr. Shirin Kalyan, a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, also expressed similar doubts about the current blanket vaccine mandates. In January, Dr. Howard Njoo, deputy chief public health officer of Canada and one of the experts advising the NDP-Liberal government, went even further and stated that vaccination should be voluntary. I do not know what science the government says it is following, but we cannot find it. We would like to see it, as well as the advice that led it to make vaccination mandatory for federal or federally regulated employees. Unfortunately, it does not seem to exist. The advice always stated the opposite. Yes, vaccination was highly recommended. However, did vaccination have to be mandatory? I remember a certain Prime Minister saying that he would never force Canadians to get vaccinated. Who was that? It was the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister. All of a sudden, two days before a certain date in August, vaccine mandates became the thing to do. Two days later, an election was called, and the pandemic became an election issue. The pandemic was exploited for political purposes. The Prime Minister paid the price, because Canadians said no. However, as I said earlier, he has since bought himself a majority, but that is another story, and we can talk about that later. So far, the Prime Minister's inaction has hurt our economy, international trade and the Canadian tourism industry. It continues to cause irreparable harm, since thousands of federal employees and federally regulated workers are still out of work because the government is sitting idle and is not listening to its own experts. In conclusion, I would like to know when the Prime Minister plans to get public servants back to work, lift the vaccine mandate and allow Canadians to get back to normal. It is time to stop playing partisan politics with COVID-19 and the pandemic. It is time to do what experts are urging us to do and end vaccine mandates across the country.

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