44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 19, 2022 10:00AM
- May/19/22 10:38:52 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there was a lot in my hon. colleague's speech that I agree with, and she made some excellent points.
However, she, too, was at the transport committee when we heard from the Canadian Airports Council that the number one factor contributing to delays at the airport is the staffing issue. Removing all of the pandemic measures and pandemic rules is not going to address the massive staffing shortage.
Why did she not include a proposed solution to the staffing crisis in this motion?
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- May/19/22 11:20:08 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, numerous constituents of mine have asked me if I know when the government plans to lift the restriction on unvaccinated Canadians from accessing air travel, given the current evidence on transmission. I noticed a recent article from Dr. Zain Chagla in The Globe and Mail, suggesting that the current restriction makes no sense.
I understand that the mandate is under review by the government, so I wonder this. Could the parliamentary secretary indicate to the House when that review will be complete, and how the results of that review will be communicated, both to this place and to all Canadians?
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- May/19/22 11:40:56 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague talked a bit about transparency and sharing information. Just recently, I asked the parliamentary secretary a pretty straightforward question about a review that is under way. I asked when that review will be completed and how the information from that review will be shared with the Canadian public. She answered with the same old mantra that had nothing to do with the question.
Does the hon. member agree with me that this sort of mantra-based public policy actually erodes public trust at a time when we need to be strengthening it more than ever?
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- May/19/22 11:58:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise. I will be sharing my time with the excellent member for Vancouver Kingsway this morning.
It is a pleasure to rise and speak about the situation in our major airports, a situation that I think by now pretty much every Canadian across the country is familiar with. It is a situation that is chaotic, and it is a situation that is having real impacts on a lot of people.
For over two years, Canadians were asked to put off travel plans. They could not visit family members; they missed major life events; they had to cancel long-awaited holidays; they could not travel to other parts of Canada or other parts of the world. People made significant sacrifices to protect each other, to protect their loved ones and to protect their communities. They helped buy time for frontline health workers before we had vaccines, and they kept it up when new variants emerged and threatened to derail our collective efforts. The vast majority of Canadians did their part, and for that they deserve our thanks.
With many restrictions now lifted, people are excited to travel again, which is understandable, and they are returning to our airports in huge numbers. Last week, an average of 120,000 travellers went through our major airports each day. That is a huge number, but once at the airports, they are being stuck in long screening lines. Planes are stuck on the tarmac without passengers able to leave. People are missing flights, and much more. Of course, people are rightly frustrated by this situation. These delays are creating stress and anxiety for travellers and they need to be addressed. This situation was foreseeable. It has been going on for weeks and the government needs to fix it.
Why is this happening? As we heard at the transport committee from the Canadian Airports Council, the biggest factor is staffing, especially the lack of screening personnel needed to move passengers through security. Screening capacity is a federal responsibility through the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, CATSA.
Like many sectors of our economy, aspects of the air transport sector have struggled to rehire employees laid off earlier in the pandemic, and we have heard about that challenge in today's debate already. As the hospitality industry has experienced, some staff simply are not available to hire back because they have moved on to other positions with better work conditions, better compensation and better terms of employment. The minister needs to ensure that the terms of employment related to these positions, the positions at our airports that are needed to screen passengers, are adequate to attract and retain the skilled workforce that we need to ensure safe air travel for all those who fly.
The other issue, of course, is the fact that the pandemic is still very much with us, and it is hard to maintain staffing levels when employees are catching COVID and leaving work because they are sick.
The government should have been able to predict that these challenges would emerge. It should have hired sufficient staff, and if it struggled to find people to do the work, it should have reviewed the terms of those positions to ensure that they are competitive and able to attract and retain the people it needs.
The Liberal government first announced it was relaxing travel restrictions on February 15, with mandatory arrival testing and quarantine scrapped at the end of February. Liberals were happy to go around saying how exciting it was that travel was back and Canada was reopening in time for the tourism season, but over three months have passed since those announcements, and it is clear that the government has not done enough to ensure that our airports are ready. Now Canadians are facing the consequences of the government's mismanagement and lack of preparedness. This was entirely avoidable. It should have been anticipated and it needs to be fixed.
We have seen the same mishandling from the government with passport applications. I am sure everyone in the House has heard from constituents who are facing incredibly lengthy delays and long lines at Service Canada offices because the government failed to anticipate an increase in demand for travel when the restrictions were relaxed. The same folks who were left scrambling to get their passports on time a few weeks ago are now at the airport experiencing long lines at security screening. They are frustrated and anxious because of the delays they are seeing.
Instead of acknowledging the government’s failure to prepare, the transport minister had the audacity to blame the travellers themselves, saying that it was their lack of practice and the slowness with which they took the liquids out of their bags that were leading to these long delays at the airport. Frankly, that is offensive.
Shifting to the riding I represent, I am particularly mindful of tourism operators in northwest B.C. and across Canada, who have looked forward to a season of welcoming back clientele from across Canada and around the world. I think of operators in the Bulkley Valley, the Bella Coola Valley, Haida Gwaii and Prince Rupert. They are looking forward to finally getting their business back, and the last thing they need is their clients hearing that travelling to Canada is a hassle because of the delays at our airports. That is going to hurt the tourism business right across Canada, and it needs to be addressed.
The Conservatives have brought this forward because they see a very particular opportunity in this crisis, which is the opportunity to once again try their hand at removing every health measure, every restriction and every tool we have to protect Canadians and safeguard our country against future waves of the virus. We disagree with that approach.
We disagree because the pandemic is still very much with us and because there are some public health measures, we believe, that are likely still advisable for the ongoing protection of Canadians and the detection of the virus at our border. Most of all, we disagree because we believe important public health measures should be informed by public health science, not by politics.
The motion before us makes the claim that Canada’s international allies are removing all travel restrictions. Simply put, that is not the case. Just to the south of us, the United States still requires a predeparture COVID test. That is more restrictive than here in Canada. Almost every country requires proof of vaccination to enter. Saying that our international allies are lifting all restrictions is simply not accurate.
We have an opportunity to strike a balance between enabling the mobility of Canadians and keeping in place tools that allow us to respond to future public health threats. The question is, do the current pandemic travel measures strike the right balance? Are they defensible? Are they based on the best available evidence? How are they better than other, similar measures that have been proposed as alternatives? This is where the blame goes back to the Liberal government, which has been less than forthcoming of late when it comes to these pandemic measures.
In fact, the NDP wrote to Dr. Tam in March and called on her to conduct a full re-evaluation of Canada’s pandemic measures and report back to Canadians. The letter from the member for Vancouver Kingsway and the member for Elmwood—Transcona simply highlighted that creating trust in public health measures requires explaining the arguments and sharing the evidence on which they are based.
I have asked questions on this topic in this very debate today. I have asked the government to tell us when it will be reporting back from its review and how that information will be shared with Canadians, yet we do not get a response.
The questions are growing. Just last week, infectious disease expert Dr. Zain Chagla from McMaster University published an article stating that, in his view, Canada’s “current rules for travel do not make sense”. A few days ago, a Globe and Mail editorial asked whether the measures in place are still needed.
The government needs to be more transparent with Canadians about the evidence behind any remaining public health measures. It needs to clearly communicate the data and the science informing these decisions. The government needs to stand up and answer. The truth is that it has become less transparent and less forthcoming precisely at a time in the pandemic when the public needs answers more than ever.
It was not always this way. We remember the beginning of the pandemic, when Canadians received in-depth explanations of every measure and the evidence justifying it. The result was high public trust, high compliance with restrictions and guidelines, and a sense that we were all pulling in the same direction.
The situation at the airports is frustrating. People who are having their travel plans cancelled are under extreme stress. The government should have seen this coming and it should have fixed it. We need more answers and more transparency from the Liberal government.
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- May/19/22 12:09:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, a review that has no terms of reference, no scope identified, no timeline and no date on which the results will be reported back to the public really is not a review at all. To say that things are constantly being reviewed really undermines the whole concept of having something called a “review”, which most Canadians understand to be a process that has a start and finish and a process through which results are communicated.
The parliamentary secretary said some things that I do agree with, one of which is that we need this to be based on science, but we need the government to be instilling public trust by providing answers to the basic questions. These are reasonable questions that, in fact, public health experts themselves are asking, and Canadians deserve answers.
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- May/19/22 12:11:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not an infectious diseases expert, and many of us in this place are not, so I will go back to the basic principle that the government has a responsibility to communicate the basic rationale for the measures that it puts in place in a way that Canadians understand. It should also respond to the independent public health experts, who have asked very rational and important questions. That is how we build public trust at a time when we need it more than ever. The reality is that unfortunately at this juncture in the pandemic, public trust is at a very low level. We need to correct that and we do that through transparency and communication.
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- May/19/22 12:12:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague, the member for Montcalm, makes a great point. It is one that I made earlier today, and I agree with him wholeheartedly.
To the premise of his question, the idea that there are things in the motion that are unsupportable simply because they are inaccurate and false is really a challenge. We have three opposition parties on this side of the House that I think agree on many aspects of this debate. If we had gotten together, established where that agreement lies and put forward a motion that really holds the government to account and calls for things that are rational, defensible and evidence-based, we could have made some real progress. It is sad that this is not the case.
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- May/19/22 1:11:58 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would offer that when legitimate questions are not answered directly, it erodes public trust at a time when we need public trust more than ever. I support vaccination and public health as much as anyone in this place, but there are legitimate questions about the vaccine mandates for domestic air travel, and the government refuses to provide the basic information that we need to defend those policies. Why is that?
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- May/19/22 1:43:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague down the way made some excellent points in his speech and there was much that I agree with.
Going back to the motion at hand, it calls for a return to prepandemic rules at our airports. I would submit that, in the same way that 9/11 changed forever our approach to security at airports, there may very well be some pandemic measures at our airports that are worth considering as long-term improvements in the way that we protect our country when it comes to public health. Would the member agree?
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