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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 127

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 15, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 127 - Nov/15/22
Mr. Ted Falk (Provencher, CPC)
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise in the House this evening. This is an important topic, and I appreciate that the member for Beaches—East York has brought this legislation forward and prompted the discussion that we are having here today. I can certainly understand that after the past two years of COVID, there are those who feel we need to get something like this done immediately. Nobody wants COVID or something worse to hit Canadians. Our first priority as parliamentarians is the safety and security of our citizens. We have to take the time to properly reflect on and examine what we have just gone through to have a meaningful conversation about how to respond to a future pandemic. The bill's proposal that the Minister of Health and other government ministers be the ones to put together or even make up the advisory committee to review their own response to the coronavirus is, frankly, quite ridiculous. That is like having the fox guard the henhouse, because they all have a very vested interest in the outcome. Canadians will never get the answers they deserve if the ministers who perpetuated or promoted many of the failures, abuses and violations of charter rights that we have seen over the past two years are the same ones tasked with reviewing their own government's response. Let us face it: Transparency, accountability and, frankly, honesty are hardly synonymous with the government. We have seen first-hand much of the misinformation propagated by these ministers. That is why I propose, before embarking on some of the elements contained in Bill C-293, that we need a full non-partisan national inquiry into how governments at all levels have handled the response to COVID-19, because as I reflect on the past two years, there are too many questions. These are questions that have never been answered by government, and in many cases, no one in government or the media has even had the courage to publicly ask them. Herein we have the first major issue in the government's handling of COVID. It is the “my way or the highway, we know best and do not dare ask questions about what we are doing” approach that the governments across this country have taken. We kept hearing “follow the science” and “we are following the science”. It is the political science, yes, but the last time I checked, a big part of doing real science involved asking questions, analyzing data and doing so with rigorous skepticism. We make an observation, we research the topic, we form a hypothesis, we test the experiments, we analyze the data and we report the conclusions as objectively as we can based solely on the empirical data. That is the scientific method. In the case of COVID, the government never really got beyond forming a hypothesis. The Liberals based their response on the assumptions that they and many in the medical field made in the early days of COVID, which led to selective and often misleading data being collected and used to back up those assumptions. The media also failed in their objectivity to ask questions, choosing instead to parrot government talking points as truth, sowing fear and division as they quietly pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies. They refused to allow different points of view. They did not ask the tough questions, and they silenced or mocked anyone who did. Canadians should not need to fear repercussions in their workplaces, their communities, their professional associations, online or by the media. However, that is what happened. Anyone who questioned anything related to the government's handling of COVID, at any level of government, got smeared, bullied and cancelled. In a free and democratic society, that should be deeply concerning to all of us. Governments made huge demands of Canadians, and it is incumbent on governments at all levels to provide empirical data to back up their actions. We owe that to Canadians. I sat down the other night as I prepared to deliver this speech today and started to write down some of those nagging questions. They are questions that we cannot trust the government to ask because it has sought so diligently for two years to cover up the answers from Canadians for its own political purposes. I am going to take the remaining time here to ask some of those questions. For a start, why did the government make the decision in 2019 to shut down our pandemic early warning system? We had SARS and H1N1, and we knew the potential of a Canadian epidemic. Who chose to shut it down? Who in the government was responsible for leaving Canadians defenceless? Why was there so much conflicting information provided by government and public health officials? There were days when the WHO said one thing, Dr. Tam said another and, in my province of Manitoba, Dr. Roussin said something completely different, and all on the same issue. This bred confusion, fear and mistrust. I think this is the type of issue the legislation, at least in part, may be trying to address, but again, we cannot address these issues until we know first-hand what took place and who was responsible, and we cannot trust the government to provide us with those answers. We learned that the Public Health Agency of Canada, the same department responsible for the government's COVID response, allowed our national microbiology lab in Winnipeg, one of our nation's foremost secure facilities, to be infiltrated by Chinese spies with direct links to both the Wuhan lab and the bioweapons program of the People's Liberation Army. Why? The government sued Parliament to cover it up. It refused to come clean. Then it turned around and made a deal with China to be the sole manufacturer of Canada's vaccine supply. The deal ultimately fell through, but there are a lot of questions here that require answers. Why does the government refuse to release procurement details, such as the price per dose, when other governments have been transparent? There are still legitimate questions related to vaccine safety and efficacy. Why did the government agree to hide the safety data on Pfizer for 75 years? There are 51,714 Canadians who have suffered vaccine injuries to date as a result of their COVID shots, with 10,501 serious reactions, including 874 anaphylactic reactions, 1,342 cases of myocarditis, 140 thrombosis cases and 382 reports with an outcome of death following vaccination. Where does that information come from? It is from the government's own website. Anyone can look it up. There are also many reports of doctors refusing to even file a VAERS report, which is a vaccine adverse event reaction report. How many of those individuals have been compensated by the government's vaccine injury program to date? It is eight. Why is the media quiet about those things? Why is it that the Prime Minister was more interested in his political fortunes than in public health? We saw this in the Prime Minister's decision to call an unnecessary election last fall. We have seen this in his unacceptable rhetoric demonizing those who chose not be vaccinated and in his heavy-handed approach to dealing with vaccine mandate protests. One minute our truckers are essential workers and heroes who kept our country going, and the next they are villains so awful that the Emergencies Act was invoked to deal with them. The inquiry, and ultimately history, will show what an unjustified and politically motivated response that was. There are also serious questions related to government spending. The Liberal government spent unprecedented amounts, hundreds of billions of dollars, to fight COVID, but its own Parliamentary Budget Officer shows that at least 40% of that money, or $205 billion, never went to fighting COVID. Where did it go? We know that tens of millions of dollars have found their way into the pockets of Liberal cronies, as the government paid exponentially more for ventilators and other medical equipment that was never used and now sits collecting dust in warehouses. Who got rich while Canadians suffered? Why did the government refuse to put any safeguards in place for CERB, resulting in three million people, including criminals in jail, receiving the CERB benefit? Why did the government send federal public servants home at a time when five million Canadians had lost their jobs and were forced into government programs and unable to access services? Why are they still at home? My office has stayed open every day over the past two years to help Canadians. We did it safely and we had no issues with COVID. There is no reason that other government officials and agencies could not have done likewise. Canadians are paying their salaries, and public servants need to get back to the office and back to work full time for Canadians. We could keep going on here all evening. We could talk about divisive and unscientific mandates. We could talk about the disastrous ArriveCAN app. We could talk about how the government's actions destroyed border communities and separated loved ones. We could talk about how Canadians were assaulted in quarantine hotels. We could talk about the provinces and their responses, and the draconian measures that in my view did far more long-term harm than good. The questions go on and on. Canadians deserve answers. Over the past two years, governments have made big demands of Canadians. Canadians stepped up again and again, only to have their hopes dashed by government failures and broken promises as the goalposts were moved over and over again. Canadians deserve empirical justification for mandates. History will show that mandates were based on politics, not public health. After two years of sickness, restrictions, divisions and fear, governments at all levels need to be held accountable for their actions. Bill C-293 is insufficient because the government, and any government, cannot and should not be trusted to investigate itself.
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