44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 1, 2022 10:00AM
- Nov/1/22 3:13:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. There have been consultations and I hope that if you seek it, you will find consent for the following motion: That given that: one, that the mental health of Canadians has been negatively impacted by the pandemic; two, that economic conditions are exacerbating financial barriers to mental health supports; and, three, that our public health care system is under immense strain, the House call upon the government to put into place a Canada mental health transfer without delay.
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- Nov/1/22 3:30:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, first of all, the vaccine obviously was a helpful tool during the pandemic, but it was not a means to mandate things and to drive a wedge in the country. That is what the government has done. We see programs like the ArriveCAN app that waste $54 million, which is just a drop in the bucket of some of the other scandals the government has had. The Liberals have managed to use these issues as a way to divide Canadians and to further line the pockets of their Liberal friends. That is a problem.
That is why we have this motion on the table today to get the Auditor General to look at the performance of the app. It is a simple motion. I hope the member will be supporting it.
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- Nov/1/22 3:33:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, seniors in different areas of the country have different issues that are impacting them. For example, in Saskatchewan, if there was no carbon tax, their pensions, OAS and GIS would go further. There are lots of other initiatives that would help seniors. As far as the motion goes, seniors were writing to my office throughout the pandemic. They were vaccinated and met all the requirements, but they were still forced to quarantine for 14 days. This meant they had issues getting their prescriptions and getting to medical appointments. I had one guy, for example, who needed surgery on his eye, but his driver, who was his wife and happened to be an American citizen and a permanent resident of Canada, lost her ability to drive him to that appointment. They did not know what to do. There was a big issue there.
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- Nov/1/22 3:34:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the esteemed member of Parliament for Kings—Hants, which is in the beautiful province of Nova Scotia.
To appreciate the need and benefits of ArriveCAN, it is important to understand the context of where we started. At the onset of the pandemic, monitoring health measures at the border was a paper-based process.
In early 2020, the government implemented, through orders in council, strong border measures to slow the introduction and transmission of COVID-19 into Canada. We went from a few thousand travellers requiring additional health measures at the border per year, really per day, to millions of travellers being tested. The existing system was not operationally sustainable for the magnitude of COVID-19.
I would like to add that the measures that we introduced and the measures the provinces introduced were meant to protect Canadians, meant to protect their health and safety. This was the number one and most important priority for any government in Canada, but was also meant to allow for the building of capacity within our health care system.
When we think about asking people to wear masks, asking people to physically distance, asking people to stay home, and asking owners of restaurants who invested their lives and sweat into building their businesses to shut down, it was not done haphazardly. It was done with the intention of making sure that Canadians were kept safe and sound during the pandemic. It was the right thing to do. With that, it was the right thing to do to introduce the ArriveCAN app.
To implement the emergency orders, we collected contact information from travellers. This was initially done in paper form. Information was shared with provinces and territories to identify travellers quarantining in their jurisdictions. It was also exchanged with local law enforcement to inform them in their day-to-day operations and was used to contact travellers to verify their compliance with quarantine requirements.
Before ArriveCAN was launched, it was a cumbersome process at the border. Further exacerbating the process was the need to collect forms using biohazard protocols, as this was the period when there was suspicion that the virus could live on paper.
In the early days, shipping paper forms across the country, digitizing and inputting information into existing systems could take upwards of 14 days. It is within this context that ArriveCAN was created in the spring of 2020 as a joint initiative between the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency.
Without ArriveCAN, border services officers would have needed to ask each traveller health questions and review their documents. By using the app, travellers saved approximately five minutes each time they crossed the border. The app was downloaded more than 18 million times, and allowed more than 16 million travellers to expedite their border crossing.
Now that vaccine mandates and other health requirements have been removed, the advance CBSA declaration feature of the app can be used voluntarily to make customs and immigration declarations in advance. This continues to save travellers time at participating airports.
I do hope to see this form of advance CBSA declaration in an app be used for all travellers entering Canada, specifically Canadian citizens, to expedite their process through airports, such as Pearson airport. I use Pearson airport on a regular basis as do many of my colleagues, as I see them there on Sunday evenings or Monday mornings.
The budget allocated for ArriveCAN is $54 million by March 31, 2023. The budget breakdown can be found on the CBSA website.
As the science evolved, so too did our technology. Initially, ArriveCAN was simply a digitized version of the paper traveller contact information form that travellers were completing upon arrival to Canada.
Collecting information remotely prior to a traveller’s arrival minimized the number of questions that the border services officer had to ask each traveller. This speeded up processing times and also limited the exposure of officers to each traveller, protecting the public safety of individuals working for CBSA and various partner agencies
In a public health crisis, time and information are critical. With the paper forms, we had actionable information on day five to eight of a traveller’s quarantine. With ArriveCAN, we accelerated that to useful data within 48 hours.
The decision to make an ArriveCAN submission mandatory for all air travellers in November 2020 and all land travellers in February 2021 further facilitated PHAC’s ability to administer border measures, with the goal of mitigating the importation and spread of COVID-19, again to protect the public health and safety of Canadians.
As border measures evolved quickly to respond to the omicron variant, so did ArriveCAN. Travel history data was used to identify recent arrivals from countries of concern. PHAC was subsequently able to contact those travellers individually by email and phone, ask them to test and place them in necessary quarantine. This response would have been impossible without the ArriveCAN app.
Like at other points in history, the need to take timely action drove innovation. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the development of a more efficient process to manage large volumes of health data. The purpose and value of ArriveCAN to manage public health measures at the border cannot be understated. Again, it was to protect the safety and health of Canadians.
ArriveCAN is a tool that evolved with the pandemic, adopting changes with each new order in council. It improved the quality of the scientific data PHAC collected, which supported decision-making based on science and allowed the crucial exchange of information with provinces and territories. Without ArriveCAN, Canada’s ability to administer the border measures put in place to protect public health would have been significantly reduced. We needed a more streamlined digital approach to manage, track and protect our borders during the largest health care crisis we have faced in nearly a century and have seen in our lifetime, and that was the ArriveCAN app.
It is important to understand that ArriveCAN is not a just an information-sharing app. It is a secure, transactional app and web tool that used the internationally recognized SMART health card standard to verify proof of vaccination. ArriveCAN improved data quality and enhanced our ability to verify compliance rates under the Quarantine Act.
The budget includes far more than the creation and launch of the app itself. The cost to develop and launch the original version of the app in April 2020 was approximately $80,000. To ensure Canada’s COVID-19 response remained effective, the Government of Canada made regular adjustments to border measures, informed by scientific evidence, available data and international travel patterns. Support for these adjustments required 70 updates and upgrades to ArriveCAN. Each of these had to be developed and tested prior to launch to ensure the app was up to date and secure.
To that end, the total budget for ArriveCAN also includes all the necessary work to operate, maintain and upgrade the app over the last two years. It also covers the work done by Service Canada employees at the call centre, who answered over 645,000 calls and helped travellers during the pandemic. Again, the app, much like all the measures that were brought in during COVID-19 and that are ongoing, was meant to protect the public health and safety of Canadians.
Given the urgency of the pandemic, the app needed to be developed as quickly as possible. The CBSA had to use several professional services contracts for the development and maintenance of ArriveCAN based on their expertise. All contracts and payments were made in accordance with the Government of Canada’s policies and directives. This included safeguards to ensure the private information of Canadians using the app was protected, which was fundamental.
In conclusion, as Canada continues to recover from the pandemic, the CBSA will continue to work hard to make technology available at the border to help speed up travel and enhance the safety and security of Canadians. I hope to see the ArriveCAN app and iterations thereof used in CBSA pre-clearance for travellers coming through airports in Canada, particularly Canadian citizens, to speed up the process of clearing customs and immigration via CBSA.
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- Nov/1/22 4:00:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, no, I will not admit that, nor do I think this government has violated any charter rights.
I know the member opposite was appointed the shadow minister of civil liberties, I believe, by the member for Carleton. Let me say this, as she did make reference to the World Health Organization. It was the work we did internationally, along with the provinces and territories, to respond to the pandemic that made sure there were vaccines in place and there were measures there. I already mentioned there were 60,000 Canadians who died as a result of COVID–19. This was a serious virus. We responded in the manner that it had to be done. I would not take the approach of the United States, where 10 times the number of deaths happened.
We stand by our record. We stand by the way we responded to a very nuanced situation and the fact that we can stand here two years later confidently with Canadians protected, the majority of whom have been vaccinated.
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- Nov/1/22 4:01:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.
I am surprised to hear him brag about the economy, when in the cases of ArriveCAN and Roxham Road there seem to be some questionable contracts to look at, to say the least. He talked about the economic statement. While the government is giving money to companies, the minister is already telling Canadians that they will have to tighten their belts. It is a double standard for businesses and individuals.
After the pandemic, there are systems where people need help. There is the issue of health transfers that we put in as a condition for the economic statement, help for seniors 65 to 74 who are once again being ignored by the government, as well as the whole issue of employment insurance. I think that despite the tough times that are coming, it is definitely not the time to be making cuts in these areas.
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- Nov/1/22 4:31:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to note that I will be sharing my time with my esteemed and valued colleague from Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot
One of the roles of government is to protect the public, particularly through border controls. In the case of a pandemic such as the one we have experienced, this is a matter of protecting the public from the spread of the virus within our borders.
Increased spread of a virus can put additional pressure on the country's health care systems, which have been compromised by inadequate federal transfers to Quebec and the provinces for the past 30 years, despite the constitutional agreements. Therefore, it was necessary to avoid putting more pressure on health care systems by protecting our people from anything that could be transmitted by travellers from here and abroad. That was part of the purpose of the ArriveCAN app: to ensure that travellers were not only vaccinated, but also tested negative before arriving in Canada.
Today, we are debating a strangely worded motion. I will read it:
That, given that, (i) the cost of government is driving up the cost of living, (ii) the Parliamentary Budget Officer states that 40% of new spending is not related to COVID-19, (iii) Canadians are now paying higher prices and higher interest rates as a result, (iv) it is more important than ever for the government to respect taxpayer dollars and eliminate wasteful spending, the House call on the Auditor General of Canada to conduct a performance audit, including the payments, contracts and sub-contracts for all aspects of the ArriveCAN app, and to prioritize this investigation.
The motion's preamble lays out problems that people are experiencing because of inflation, but it also relates the Parliamentary Budget Officer's finding that $200 billion in ostensibly pandemic-related spending was not necessarily related to COVID‑19. Current inflation is not due solely to government spending. Other factors contributed to the inflation we are experiencing now.
Some aspects of the preamble simplify a complex inflationary reality into a single element. These aspects are followed by the motion itself, some of which is bewilderingly vague. In fact, upon rereading all the points of the preamble and the motion, one might first get the impression that the Conservative Party wants the Auditor General to analyze all aspects of pandemic management, which would be a monumental task if it were not done by subject. Fortunately, this is later clarified. The motion says at the end that the performance audit relates to all aspects surrounding the ArriveCAN app. It is a pretty flawed motion.
Despite this, my Bloc Québécois colleagues and I are inclined to vote in favour of the motion. We are inclined to do so because it is important to know whether public funds were used excessively to create this tool, ArriveCAN. That said, I have serious questions about the Conservative Party's priorities. Yes, $54 million is a lot of money, but it should be, in theory, a “one-hit wonder”. Year after year, $67 million is paid for symbolic monarchist functions, and the Conservatives voted against abolishing the control these monarchist functions have over the decisions of the people's representatives in the House and in all democratic chambers in Canada.
Basically, that is what ArriveCAN should have been. It should have been a screening and security tool at the border that border officers could use to quickly identify travellers that needed to quarantine, travellers who did not need to quarantine, and travellers that had to be turned away because they did not meet the criteria for entering Canada. If we take it one step further, ArriveCAN was also a way for Canada to save money. If members recall, before the app was created, travellers were required to quarantine in hotels reserved for that purpose. Of course, travellers had to pay for the room and their meals, and that did not come cheap, but the government had to find, train and pay additional staff to make sure that people were abiding by the quarantine requirements, whether at a hotel or at home.
Note that at the time, there were benefits for people who had to quarantine. For a brief moment, those benefits were provided to Canadian travellers returning from a trip who had to quarantine. It did not last long, thank heavens.
ArriveCAN should have been a screening and security tool, but also a way to save money by automating tracking and screening at the border to some degree. Some might gasp to hear me say that ArriveCAN was a means for screening at the border to ensure that travellers entering the country were vaccinated. The vaccination requirement raised eyebrows. Anyone who travelled before the pandemic knows that some vaccines, such as the yellow fever vaccine, and some drugs, such as antiparasitics or antimalarial drugs, are either mandatory or highly recommended for travelling to certain countries. The proof of vaccination requirement is not new in modern history. ArriveCAN would mean no longer needing to carry a vaccine record. People are less likely to forget their cellphone than a piece of paper.
The intention of ArriveCAN was to make life easier for travellers and border officers. Then again, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I was reminded of this saying because I believe that the idea of creating ArriveCAN was really based on the need for border control that would not make life difficult for anyone. However, the testimonies I received by email and in person from travellers and border officers, and those received by many members of the House, tend to show that the application had significant flaws. The first is that border officers were never consulted on the creation and implementation of the app, and yet, along with the travellers themselves, border officers were the first to experience the repercussions of ArriveCAN.
Then there were the programming problems. Vaccinated people with a negative test received a message ordering them to quarantine despite the verifications by border officers. There were also the incredible delays that paralyzed airports. Those are just a few examples of the difficulties experienced. The app required 70 whole updates. In short, ArriveCAN is an imperfect app that is difficult and even impossible for some people to use, including those who do not own a cell phone. To top it all off, it was also a very expensive app.
Newspaper articles recently disclosed that, to date, the app has cost $54 million. The committee received 2,000 documents related to ArriveCAN just last night. That does not include documents from the Canada Border Services Agency, which we are anxiously awaiting.
Once we have the documents, we hope to get to the bottom of this issue, because it is important. The problem is that the app cost $54 million when it was originally supposed to cost only a few hundred thousand dollars.
Where did those extra millions of dollars go? Does the $54 million include the development and acquisition of the app as well as the information documents handed out to travellers in airports here and abroad? Does it include advertising? Was there complacency in the management of public funds and peoples' taxes? These are just some of the questions I am asking, and I hope many others are asking them as well.
Of course, the issue is being studied by the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. However, we do not have the same means as the Office of the Auditor General, which will certainly be able to do a more thorough analysis to complement that of the committee. We must shed light on a good intention that turned into a nightmare for border officers and many travellers. There have been extraordinary cost overruns, and we believe it would be useful for the Office of the Auditor General to conduct an in-depth analysis.
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- Nov/1/22 4:42:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as I said in my speech, before the pandemic, travellers sometimes needed proof of vaccination against diseases such as yellow fever to enter certain countries. That is still the case today. There was no little cellphone app at the time.
Was the ArriveCAN app strictly necessary?
The answer is no. The government could have used other tools that have been available for a long time.
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- Nov/1/22 5:01:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, $1.3 trillion is where Canada's national debt is now. It is more than double what it was a few years earlier. The Liberal government has more than doubled all the debt that every prime minister in the history of this country has ever accumulated. What has that led to? It has led to the inflationary crisis, the cost of living crisis and a whole host of other issues.
I know what my colleagues in the Liberal Party will say. They will say that they spent this money during the pandemic because they wanted to take care of Canadians. However, there is a small problem in that. It is very clear that 40% of that spending had nothing to do with the pandemic, and they cannot get out of it. This is clear and unequivocal, so they cannot say that they spent all of this money just because of that.
The “arrive can't” app is a great illustration of exactly the kind of spending this government engages in over and over again. It throws money at things without a care or concern for taxpayers. Whether the money is well spent or not, it is just going to spend.
When we look at where we are right now, the Prime Minister said very clearly many times that we took on this debt so that Canadians would not have to, and interest rates would be low for a very long time, so it is not going to affect the fiscal capacity of this country. Well, guess what. He is wrong. I know that is not a surprise, as he is wrong about a lot things. He is also wrong to not think about monetary policy.
When we talk about where Canadians are today, they have massive credit card debt. Actually, right now Canadians have $171 billion of HELOC debt. What is HELOC debt, and why does that matter? HELOC debt is a home equity line of credit, and they are at variable interest rates. Therefore, as interest rates rise, their payments rise, and the ability for Canadian families to make ends meet declines. What we end up with are all the challenges Canadians are experiencing right now, whether it is making ends meet, heating their home, or dealing with the cost of living and inflation.
The Liberal spending binge has caused untoward damage for Canadians, and there has been an other effect as interest rates have risen. The Prime Minister said, in effect, for Canadians not to worry. He said that interest rates were not going to go up, so when we borrowed all of this money, everything would be fine. There was nothing to see there.
Well, guess what. We now spend more money servicing the debt in Canada than we do on the Canada health transfer. I will let that sink in for a minute. When we hear about the issues that are going on in hospitals across the country, and we hear about it all the time, we are spending more to pay interest on the debt than we are on the Canada health transfer. That is the shameful, embarrassing legacy of this government.
Then the government does things like spend $54 million on the “arrive can't” app. Why do I say the “arrive can't” app? It is because it does not work. We know that it does not work. Ten thousand Canadians were put into quarantine wrongly, and I was one of those 10,000 Canadians. I returned home. I was vaccinated. I got my green stamp on my passport, and guess what. The phone calls started the next day telling me I was to be in quarantine.
I said, “No I am not. I am vaccinated. I have done every thing right, and I was told that I was cleared at the border.”
The phone calls kept coming. Sometimes there were 15 phone calls a day to verify that I was at home. I am a big boy. I can take it. I dealt with it. Imagine older or vulnerable Canadians going through that. They would not just say that it is nothing to worry about. They are going to be incredibly traumatized by that experience. When I talk about the “arrive can't” app, that is a great example.
If that were the end of the story, it might have been terrible but not terrible. When I finally did get in touch with someone to speak with someone, the advice was, “Don't answer the phone. We can't take you off the list. It's impossible.” We have more than double the national debt and people have been wrongly put into quarantine and the answer is, “Don't answer your phone.” The phone just keeps ringing 15 to 20 times a day.
I had the real concern that at some point they might say they have to send a police officer, because that happened as well. Imagine the waste of resources across the country as a result of police officers going to enforce quarantine orders because the “arrive can't” app could not do the one thing it was supposed to do.
They might say not to worry because it is fixed and it is all good, that the “arrive can't” app is now fine, but guess what? On Twitter just yesterday, someone we all might know, Robert Fife reported long lineups at Pearson to get through customs. The $54-million “arrive can't” app is supposed to expedite processing through customs but the officer laughed and said the app is irrelevant so not to waste time filling it out.
We have an app that does not work. We have an app that puts people into quarantine when they should not be in quarantine. We have people then subjected to dozens of phone calls, virtually harassing them to be in quarantine when they should not. It does not work and it cost $54 million. What we have heard since then very clearly is that this could have been done for $80,000. If that was the end of the story, that would be bad enough, of course, but it is not. The story just keeps going. There are contractors and subcontractors who are listed as having been paid for the app. They said, “We did not get paid. Why are we on this list?”
I cannot explain properly how terrible that is for Canadian taxpayers, Canadians who are suffering through an affordability crisis, to see the cavalier and callous spending of their hard-earned tax dollars by the Liberal government. The Liberal government does not apologize. It would be one thing if the Liberals got up and said, “We messed up. Canadians, we're sorry. We know this thing was a thousand times more expensive than it should have been. We've learned our lesson. We're going to fix it,” but they do not. Liberals just ask us, “What is wrong with you? How dare you criticize this. This app was designed to save Canadians. You did not want to save Canadians.” The kind of hyperbole the Liberals are engaging in quite frankly is shameful. They should be apologizing to Canadians for this absolute debacle. Of course, we know they will not.
Now we get to the gist of this motion, which is to have the Auditor General come in and audit this. Let us get to the bottom of it. If the Liberals cared about Canadians, if they cared about taxpayer money, if they know they did not do anything wrong, they would say, “Fantastic. Let us have the Auditor General come in.” We have to remember that it was the Prime Minister who said “We will be open by default.” To have the Auditor General look at this program, the Liberals will say, “We are not going to do that.”
That is an interesting definition of open by default. It is the kind of behaviour that the government has repeatedly engaged in. I ask myself and I ask Canadians who are watching today, what do the Liberals have to hide? Why are they afraid of an independent officer of Parliament coming in and looking at the books?
The Liberals say there is a committee and the committee could look at it. Sure. The Auditor General has far greater ability than the committee to analyze this. I go back to what are the Liberals afraid of. They are afraid of exactly that. The Liberals know they cannot filibuster the Auditor General. They know they cannot win votes to not have documents released at committee with the Auditor General. The Liberals know the Auditor General would get in there and find every embarrassing gaffe, every contract and subcontract that should never have been awarded, and it is going to be an absolutely awful day for the government.
The Liberals will stand up and argue all kinds of semantics, that we do not need to look at this, that they would have a committee look at it, or that we should not look at it because it was designed to save Canadians' lives and therefore it should be above scrutiny. None of this makes sense. When there is nothing to hide, the government should be open by default. That is the mantra of the Prime Minister who leads the government.
I do not understand why we are here. Why are we debating this motion? It should have passed with unanimous consent. After the Conservative leader rose to give an impassioned speech about this, with a unanimous consent motion, the Auditor General would have been looking at this, and we would have the answer in no time.
Instead, the Liberals are going to try to delay. They are going to try to find a way to win this vote in the House of Commons. Maybe they will be able to do that as part of their coalition. Maybe they will make some kind of an amendment to the costly coalition agreement, so they can survive scrutiny from the independent officer of Parliament.
Actions speak louder than words. The Liberals' actions in not just saying that we are going to have the Auditor General look into this speaks volumes about what they know the Auditor General is going to find how terribly run this program was, and how embarrassing it is going to be for the government.
Why will the Liberals not just vote in favour of it? Let us have the Auditor General look into the dirty dealings of this contract.
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- Nov/1/22 6:27:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member for giving me the opportunity to talk about our efforts to help Canadians live healthier lives.
Chronic diseases are critical issues for Canadians and for our health care system. That includes diet-related diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, and they are claiming the lives of more and more Canadians every day. These chronic diseases increase physical vulnerabilities and put Canadians more at risk.
As we have just seen these past two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, these diseases have far-reaching impacts on quality of life, not just for those Canadians living with these diseases but also their loved ones as well as health care systems.
At the outset of my friend's speech, he mentioned that he sometimes meanders a little bit like a sinusoidal river, like a creek I used to paddle down, and I tend to agree. However, it is kind of a serious thing, because adjournment debates, late shows, are meant to achieve something. They are meant to allow me, as a parliamentary secretary, to come here to talk about an important issue my friend and colleague raised in the House of Commons and felt was not adequately responded to.
I appreciate sometimes, in the haste of trying to find some notes or answer a question on the fly, my answers might not always be perfectly adequate. We do not get to practise all of the answers. People get to practise a question. If they know they are up in 14 minutes, they can go in front of the mirror and practise their question. Indeed, we often see members of the opposition practising their questions beforehand, and that is good. It adds to the level of debate.
What does not add to the level of the debate is the abuse of the late shows. The adjournment debates are meant to do one specific thing. It is meant to provide a bit more integrity to this whole parliamentary system. I feel, in this case and in previous cases, members are choosing to abuse the adjournment debate system.
I am happy to come to have a conversation about any subject. However, to use the late show, we need to first indicate there is a specific question we would like more information on. I have two jobs actually. I think about it a lot. The nature of my work is divided in two a little bit. I am a member of Parliament, and I represent my neighbours in Milton, Ontario, but I also represent the government. I am a parliamentary secretary for two ministers on subjects I care deeply about, which are health and sport. I think they are connected, and I was very grateful when the Prime Minister asked me to serve in this dual capacity.
In order to do a good job on the second part of my job, which is to represent the government, I cannot just come to the House and tell members about all of my great ideas, where I stand or what the great people of Milton want to hear. I also need to do my job as a parliamentary secretary and represent the views and the position of the government. However, I cannot do that if I am not given a bit of a heads-up on what the nature of the question will be.
The member for Bow River had indicated that he wanted to talk to me today about front-of-pack labelling for ground beef. In the previous session of the previous Parliament, our plan was to provide more information to consumers on the foods they consume when they have higher levels of fat, salt and sugar. It is a good plan. Some members raised important concerns around ground beef, how it is a single-ingredient food that does contain a bit more fat. Most of the fat gets cooked off when we prepare it. It was a good, valid concern, so we changed the way we package and label ground beef.
However, that has nothing to do with the question the member asked. He asked me about plastics and the pharmaceutical industry, or how we dealt with that—
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- Nov/1/22 6:37:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I genuinely want to thank my friend and colleague for her sincere concern for the health care crisis in Canada, and I too wish to thank health care workers in my community of Milton, in the province of Ontario and across Canada. The burden they have shouldered over the last couple of years has been immense, immeasurable and unfair, and that burden continues today.
The pandemic is not over and the backlog ensues. People are counting on us as legislators to find solutions to problems, and today in the health committee we put the final touches on our committee report on the human resources in health care crisis. I am looking forward to it being tabled in the House of Commons, because I think it creates some really good recommendations for our government, as well as for the Minister of Health, whom I am very privileged to work with.
Obviously, the minister appeared a number of times, as did officials, doctors, nurses and representatives of the health care system across the country, and it is a good report. I am proud of the work and proud of the recommendations, and I am looking forward to seeing the outcomes from the meeting that is upcoming with the Minister of Health and all of the ministers of health from all of the premiers across the country.
However, the question today is about the human resource health care crisis. The current shortage of health workers has led to reduced hospital capacities. We have seen in some cases a complete closure of emergency rooms, which cannot happen in a Canadian town or city, and that is enhanced, as my hon. colleague pointed out, in rural areas. We know that people who live in rural and remote areas already have a harder time accessing health care, and now they are being hardest hit by health worker shortages.
Long-standing systemic challenges, which were exacerbated by the pandemic, have resulted in health workers managing high patient workloads, resource scarcity, fear for personal safety and unprecedented levels of burnout, absences and turnover. We have a health care crisis, because we have a health workers crisis.
From the beginning, our government has worked hard and hand in hand with provinces and territories in the fight against COVID-19. We provided them with an extra $72 billion to support health systems and protect Canadians. That included a $2-billion top-up just recently to the Canada health transfer to improve health care in Canada, including by reducing backlogs from COVID-19 and growing our health workforce. This will help to support the health and well-being of Canadians and those on the front lines of our health care system.
To support the mental health and well-being of our health force, budget 2022 also provided $140 million over two years to the Wellness Together Canada portal, which offers free confidential mental health and substance use tools and services for frontline health care workers.
As I mentioned, I live in Ontario, and the Premier of Ontario has been talking about the need to fund incrementally health care in Canada. We have been there very consistently throughout the pandemic and before. They are using some numbers I do not think are necessarily true, with respect to the percentage the federal government currently contributes to health care. I do think the federal portion of the Canada health transfer needs to go up. However, I think it would be irresponsible for us, as the federal government in Canada, to provide that transfer without listing some priorities and ensuring there are some targeted measures those provincial and territorial governments will ensure occur.
Canadians deserve to know these health care dollars are being spent responsibly, and as an Ontarian, when I receive hundreds of dollars in a rebate to my licence plate stickers right before a provincial election, which was right after that incremental $2 billion went out to provinces and territories, I am concerned the provinces and territories are balancing their books. Having budget surpluses is not spending—
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