44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 6, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, for most of us, March 12, 2020, marked the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a major impact on the life of our communities and the organization of our societies and our work. It had an especially big impact on our social interactions.
Three years later, we have the right, as citizens, to know what really happened so that we can learn from this unprecedented public health crisis, even though we hope such a crisis never happens again.
Bill C-293, an act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness, seeks to require the Minister of Health to establish an advisory committee to review the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. Obviously, we are not against doing the right thing. If, of course, the intention of the bill is laudable, then, as the Bloc Québécois has said, and as I will say again today, an independent public inquiry is the only acceptable way to judge the government's actions. In order to shed light on the complete chain of events, we need to calmly hold an independent, transparent national inquiry, without partisanship, by opening a constructive dialogue with the various stakeholders.
We have heard the horror stories from the book entitled Le printemps le plus long, or the longest spring, a journalistic account written by Alec Castonguay. I encourage my colleagues to read it, as it is full of examples of the Liberal government's chronic lack of preparation. The threat level moved from high to critical, but the Liberal ministers' typical inaction—even though the alarm had been sounded—had serious and catastrophic repercussions on everything, including our health care systems in Quebec and in all the provinces.
I would like to highlight the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN. Essentially, it is the Public Health Agency of Canada's version of CSIS. It is an invaluable governmental tool, and it is a reference in the prevention field.
Canadian scientists are the go-to source for health alerts for 85 countries. They are able to detect chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear public health threats while constantly scanning public open-source news in real time.
In his investigative work, Alec Castonguay wrote that the GPHIN, a victim of PHAC leadership's changing priorities, was unable to sound the alarm earlier. That is the first thing we need to get to the bottom of, and that is why we need an independent public inquiry.
The Liberals changed the GPHIN's mandate because they wanted to control the message. This is the same government that, in 2015, said it would no longer muzzle scientists. The Liberals are doing the same thing as the previous government. That is unacceptable. Our people deserve so much better than what they have gotten over the last few years.
It was not until July 2020, after journalists once again uncovered the truth, that the then-health minister was forced to launch an internal inquiry to find out why officials did not sound the alarm earlier. Will we ever find out why? Honestly, I doubt it.
There are other examples. In the 1950s, during the Cold War, the Canadian government created the national emergency strategic stockpile. Essentially, its purpose is to store pharmaceuticals and supplies used by social services. It is a stockpile of medical assets, equipment and supplies. This strategic stockpile is intended to be used specifically during a pandemic or health disaster. When the Liberals came to power, they neglected this strategic resource, which is why thousands of items of personal protective equipment, including the well-known N95 masks, had to be destroyed.
If we look back, members will recall that the U.S. President at the time decided to invoke the Defense Production Act to stop the shipment of materials to fight COVID-19 to other countries, including Canada. More than 500,000 N95 masks were stuck in the United States. Thousands of health care workers were put at high risk because of this government, which might lead one to question whether it is running the country in a serious and thoughtful way.
It was Quebec that had to charter the biggest plane in the world, have it travel from Ukraine to China to fill up with protection equipment, pay the people on the tarmac at the Shanghai airport in cash and have the plane land in Mirabel, because the federal government is unable to properly manage its supply of masks. Seriously, it is a nightmare.
A contract to produce ventilators was hastily awarded to Frank Baylis, a former Liberal MP who was a friend of the government. I met him at the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. According to the worst-case estimates, we needed 13,500 ventilators, but 27,148 were ordered. That is twice as many, but, after all, “a friend is a friend”.
There was chaos at the border as well. Valérie Plante, the Montreal mayor, and François Legault, the Quebec premier, had to coordinate to send public health officers from Montreal to the Trudeau airport to enforce quarantines. I saw it with my own two eyes. In the meantime, the Trudeau government, which is often more concerned with its image than with results—
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Thank you for the reminder, Madam Speaker. We will have to make changes in 2023. I will resume my speech.
I have to say that in Laurentides-Labelle my team and I worked tirelessly to bring home our constituents. More than 50 families were stranded abroad and abandoned by the government. It was an urgent situation. I remember that it happened during the school break, a time when thousands of Quebeckers go abroad every year. We wondered if we needed to do something. That is pretty much the only responsibility the government has in health and it was still unable to carry it out. I cannot imagine what would happen if there were national standards, but that is another debate.
There have been more than 6.5 million deaths from COVID-19 around the world. In Canada, 45,000 people died. Those 45,000 families are owed answers. The role of MPs in this place is to monitor government action. We cannot shed light on a critical and tragic period by meeting behind closed doors. What we went through is not insignificant, and we all know it. People have died.
Of course, it was urgent to take action then, but we must investigate what was done so that we can do better. Our style of government is based on ministerial responsibility, and the government is responsible to the House. We, MPs, are the representatives of Canadians in 338 ridings, the people across the country who were strong and worked together during that time.
As a G7 nation, we owe it to our citizens. A national independent public inquiry is the only way forward, and that is why we will vote against the bill.
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I had a slogan suggestion for his leadership campaign as well. It was “Get high in the polls”, but anyway, I will carry on with my remarks here. I wish my friend well, but I will not be supporting his bill.
This bill is about a review of our pandemic preparedness and comes out of the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, it is sort of cliche to say but it is obvious, is the seminal event in all of our lives that has had so many dramatic consequences. There are the health consequences for so many people, but also the social and cultural consequences of the pandemic that have deeply shaped us and will continue to shape us. Most of those consequences, quite frankly, are negative and require a reaction to the social and cultural damage that has been wrought as a result of the divisions that have been created through this pandemic, some of them maybe just incidental or unintended, but some of them very much intentionally sown.
It is right that we, as politicians, as leaders but also as a society in general, should be evaluating and reviewing the effects of the pandemic and asking what happened here, how we got some things so badly wrong, what were the things that we got right, and how we could approach future pandemics in a better way. In principle, I agree with the idea of having a postpandemic review and having in place provisions to ensure that there is a plan for future pandemics. I do not regard this bill, sadly, as a serious approach to those things.
I will just mention some aspects of this. One is that Liberals love to put forward new advisory councils appointed by government ministers. We saw this with their child care bill, Bill C-35. We are seeing this again with Bill C-293, where they are saying they have this issue they have to think about and therefore they are going to have an advisory council that is going to be responsible for advising the government about it. The minister responsible for that area is going to appoint the advisory council. By the way, the advisory council should be, in certain respects, diverse, reflective of different kinds of backgrounds, experiences and so forth.
However, what guarantees diversity of thought in an advisory mechanism is diversity in the appointment process, that is, bringing in multiple voices in determining who are the right people to sit on this advisory council. If a minister chooses who sits on the advisory council, then obviously they are going to be tempted to appoint people who share their pre-existing philosophy and who are not necessarily going to dig into providing the kind of criticism that is required of the government's approach.
Various members have put forward proposals in terms of the kind of broad-based, genuinely democratic postpandemic review that we would need to have. Many of those conversations are already going on. There should be a mechanism within the government to have this kind of review. I know various provinces are looking at this already. There should be international mechanisms around pandemic review. All these things are important, but those review processes should not be a top-down, controlled whitewash. They should be authentically empowered to hold governments accountable, to ask whether we got some big things wrong in the context of the pandemic, why we got them wrong, and how we could ensure we fix those issues.
In the time I have left, let me highlight some of the things I think we got badly wrong about the pandemic, and some of the ways we need to think about how we go forward.
There were a lot of things that we did not know about COVID-19 when it started. Let us acknowledge that it was probably inevitable that we were going to get some things wrong, but at a basic level we should have had the stockpile of PPE that was required. This was coming out of past pandemics, so that people could eventually come to conclusions such as to what degree certain kinds of masks limit, or not, the spread of the virus. At the very beginning, before we knew anything, it would have been a good kind of default to say, let us make sure that we have protective equipment in place and that we have that stockpile available so that it could be available to people.
It was out of the discussion after the SARS pandemic a couple of decades ago that we created the Public Health Agency, which was supposed to help us be prepared for these things. We were not prepared. We did not have the stockpiles of PPE. In fact, we sent away PPE at a critical juncture early in the pandemic. There was a lack of preparedness, particularly around having the equipment that was required.
Members will recall, and it is important to recall, that the leading public health authorities in this country and in the U.S. said not to use masks and that masks are ineffective or even counterproductive. That was the message at the beginning. Likely, part of the reason that message was pushed, in a context where doctors and nurses were using that equipment but the general public was told not to use these things because they are counterproductive, was that there was a shortage of supply. The government could have been more honest about acknowledging the fact that there was a shortage of supply and that it had failed to plan and prepare for that reality.
This speaks to another point. There is the lack of preparedness in terms of having the PPE available, but also we would have been much better off if governments and public health authorities had been more willing to openly acknowledge the things they did not know. I think early discussions around masking were a good example of the tone we had. People were told that if they were for masking when they were supposed to be against masking, they were anti-science and they were pushing an anti-science message. Later, there was the revision, in terms of the government's messaging.
Our public health authorities and governments could have shown a greater degree of humility right at the beginning of the pandemic and said that there were just things they did not know and that masking was a reasonable precautionary measure. However, it was a very assertive approach that carried itself throughout the pandemic with respect to any diversity of opinion in terms of pandemic strategy. If people were disagreeing with the prevailing consensus, then they were supposedly anti-science. As members have pointed out, the way science progresses is through some degree of open debate and challenging presumptions. The reality is that public health bodies and governments were expressing certainty about things that they were less than certain about.
Let us acknowledge that throughout the pandemic there were various revisions. I recall, for example, that when vaccines first came out the government's message was to take the first available vaccine. Then the government said not to take AstraZeneca and recommended Pfizer or Moderna but not AstraZeneca. At the same time as the government was not recommending AstraZeneca for Canadians, I had constituents who did what the government told them to do with the first shot, and now it was telling them that they were supposed to have a second shot of a different kind, which was apparently totally fine in Canada, whereas other countries were saying that people needed to have two doses of the same kind. I understand that as the science is unfolding there are going to be things we do not know, but if the government had been willing to acknowledge in a more honest, transparent way throughout that process that there were some things we did not know, we would have been much better off.
I want to conclude by saying that I am very concerned about some of the social and cultural impacts of this pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, we were already seeing trends where there was sort of a breaking down of traditional community and a greater political polarization. People were less likely to be involved in neighbourhood and community organizations, community leagues, faith organizations and these kinds of things and were becoming more polarized along political lines. Those existing trends were dramatically accelerated through the pandemic, where the restrictions made it difficult for people to gather together in the kind of traditional community structures that had existed previously, and we have seen a heightened political polarization, with people being divided on the basis of their views on masks and their vaccination status.
As we evaluate what happened in the pandemic, and this is more of a cultural work than a political work, we need to think about how we can bring our communities back together, reconcile people across these kinds of divides and try to rebuild the kinds of communities we had previously, where people put politics aside and were willing to get together and focus on what united them.
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- Feb/6/23 7:03:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, last week, I found out that the government spent $6.7 million in fiscal year 2022 to house 10 people at a Calgary area quarantine hotel, which works out to about $670,000 per person. I asked a very simple question in the House: Was anyone fired for this? The government did not even acknowledge that this was a problem. I want to say why this is a problem, just so that, before I ask the question again, my colleague opposite understands.
First of all, fiscal year 2022, which was April 2022 onwards, was after most of the world had already lifted virtually all COVID restrictions. This was after the Government of Canada and most provincial governments and municipalities had eased COVID restrictions. This was after the government's own panel of experts said that the quarantine hotel was not necessary. This was after months of the government refusing to show any data that home quarantine could not provide the same capacity of preventing the spread of COVID that hotel quarantine did. There was no justification for this expense.
This expense was incurred even though the government had the option to end the contract with these hotels with a 30-day notice period. It did not end these contracts until after this outrageous amount of money had been spent. To me, this boils down very simply to an incompetent government that is not doing its job. It is not monitoring public expense, and at a time when inflationary spending is creating a cost of living crisis, every penny counts. The government cannot afford to be spending the same price as a beautiful two-bedroom home five minutes away from this hotel on a program that there is no justifiable reason to have. There was no justification to spend that amount of money, particularly in fiscal year 2022.
When I asked the question in the House, and I remember it vividly, the minister did not even say, “This was a problem and we should have ended it. I am looking into it to make sure this is not happening in other hotels, and I assure the Canadian public we want to be good stewards of tax dollars. I will fire somebody over this. Somebody deserves to be fired over allowing waste like this to happen.”
In the ensuing week since this exchange happened, we found out that it was not just happening at this one Calgary hotel. There were dozens of hotels across the country where this type of waste happened in fiscal year 2022 after COVID restrictions had been lifted.
I am just going to ask my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, the question again: Has somebody been fired over this waste?
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- Feb/6/23 7:07:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to come here to night to talk about some of the measures the government took earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic to protect the health and safety of Canadians. My friend and colleague opposite is doing her job well, and I appreciate that. I want to thank her for doing her job well. She knows that I do not work in HR, so I cannot comment on any specifics in regard to people's employment, but I can speak to some of the measures we took throughout the pandemic to keep Canadians healthy.
Our government consistently worked to protect Canadians by adapting our response to COVID-19 based on the latest science and evidence.
In fact, experts say that without our public health measures and vaccines, 30.7 million more Canadians would have contracted the virus, 1.85 million of those people would have been hospitalized and 700,000 would have died.
These are some numbers that are truly troubling. Gratefully, we did not get to the worst-case scenario.
The Public Health Agency of Canada had arrangements with hotels as part of their designation as quarantine facilities under the Quarantine Act, and these facilities were there as an important measure to stop the spread and to save lives. At present day, there are no designated quarantine facilities in operation in Canada. These facilities were part of our overall efforts to reduce and manage risk.
The various waves were very unpredictable. Nobody knew when they were coming. Over 22,000 travellers were admitted to designated quarantine facilities between March 22, 2020, and September 30, 2022. The costs associated with the program were not just for the rooms. There was lodging, meals, security, transportation and all sorts of public health measures. Several other countries that had quarantine hotels for travellers, such as New Zealand and Hong Kong, as well as Australia, some of those continued their programs well into 2022.
Our government has always worked to protect Canadians. We have adapted our COVID-19 response based on the latest science and evidence. Designated quarantine facilities met public health guidelines for the purposes of accommodating travellers to quarantine as required by emergency orders under the Quarantine Act.
It was a huge challenge for everybody in Canada and around the world over those couple of years, but we did our best to stand up for Canadians and make sure that there was a safe place for them to go when they got back home after a trip.
Once again, I want to thank my friend and colleague for doing her work, and for her diligence. I would be glad to take a rebuttal.
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- Feb/6/23 7:11:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have to say I appreciate my colleague's work, and I have appreciated her work over the last couple of years. She has been a really unique voice of reason from the other side. There have been some times when we have really had to shake our heads and say, “My gosh, what are people reading on the Internet?”
Just recently, the former leader of the Conservative Party did an interview. With respect to his caucus, he described that a bunch of them were spending a lot of time on the Internet. He said, “There was a section that went right down the rabbit hole of COVID—Ivermectin, the whole nine yards.”
I am glad that group does not include my friend from Calgary Nose Hill. She has been an extraordinarily rational and cogent voice in the House throughout the pandemic, and I thank her for her work in holding the government to account.
Our government remains committed to evolving our public health response as situations change, and as public health demands change, we will adapt to the needs of Canadians and apply appropriate measures at the border and monitor compliance with public health measures to prevent infection and to ensure that we continue to be a safe country for—
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