Hon. Marty Deacon: Honourable senators, what an interesting act to follow.

As 2022 draws to a close, I would like to take this opportunity to celebrate the amazing work of Team Canada over the past year. And remember, we are all Team Canada.

At the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham this summer, Team Canada won 92 medals, placing third in the medal count, its best showing since the 2002 Commonwealth Games. This was an inclusive team, with a record 28 para athletes winning seven medals. Also important is that Canada was the only carbon-neutral team at the games. We also enjoyed the largest broadcast ever for Commonwealth Games, which included incredible streaming.

These games bode well for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, where typically Canada’s Commonwealth Games athletes win 70% of Canada’s Summer Olympic Games medals. Also, our Special Olympic athletes are busy preparing for their international games in Berlin this coming spring.

Senators, it was truly an honour a few weeks ago to meet athletes, coaches and volunteers alongside our friend and former colleague Senator Munson and Dr. Frank Hayden, the father of the Special Olympics movement. Watching these athletes in the room being together for the first time in person in three years was uplifting. While the pandemic has led to fewer people volunteering — it’s an issue — we have reason to hope this will improve in due course.

On the pitch, you are all keenly aware of the successes our men’s and women’s soccer teams enjoyed. Just two days ago, Canadian soccer all-stars Christine Sinclair and Diana Matheson announced the creation of a Canadian women’s league, which will launch in 2025. Really exciting.

Slightly less known but just as amazing, our Canadian tennis men performed well, winning the Davis Cup just a few weeks ago. This is a story 15 years in the making, of an organization that needed to do things differently, focusing on high performance, opening a national training centre and hiring international coaches to take the game of tennis to the next level. We celebrate Denis Shapovalov and Félix Auger-Aliassime for this first win in 109 years, but also Milos Raonic, Genie Bouchard, Vasek Pospisil, Leylah Annie Fernandez and Bianca Andreescu.

Finally, we also saw this year bring sport under the microscope for the abuse faced by too many of our athletes at the hands of those they trusted. The stories are being heard, and the work is well under way to better ensure that every athlete, coach and volunteer can feel included and safe in sport. This is taking effort and collective will in a number of areas.

As part of this call to action, I welcome you to join me on Facebook Live next Thursday as I interview leaders who are doing all they can to bring urgent solutions to safe sport.

On a more celebratory note, we also look forward to all of you joining us for some winter activities on Tuesday, February 7, at 12:30, with more to come. Thank you. Meegwetch.

Hon. Marty Deacon: My question is for the Government Representative in the Senate, and it concerns the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senator Gold, yesterday the Auditor General released two important reports on the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, one on vaccine procurement and the other on COVID-19 benefits. These are two important snapshots of the government response that are part of a much larger picture.

Throughout the pandemic, I often heard that, through no fault of anybody’s, the government’s response to the pandemic was like building an airplane in mid-flight. There are lessons to be learned here that we cannot forget. We need a blueprint for the next big pandemic or whatever the next big thing is.

As we’ve been reminded through the daily work of Justice Rouleau, a commission of inquiry is incredibly effective at working through events in a transparent and systematic way.

Does the government intend to establish a commission of inquiry into the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and if so, when can we expect this to occur?