- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $118,419.33
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to my colleague's private member's bill, Bill C-278, an act to prevent the imposition by the federal government of vaccination mandates for employment and travel.
This bill is an important chance to right some of the wrongs Canadians endured during the COVID-19 pandemic, including and especially the violations of their rights and freedoms.
Formally, the bill:amends the Financial Administration Act to provide that the Treasury Board may not require as a condition of employment in the federal public administration that a person receive a vaccine against COVID-19. It also amends the Canada Labour Code to provide that regulations may not be made that require, as a term or condition of employment in or in connection with the operation of a federal work, undertaking or business, that a person receive a vaccine against COVID-19.
The bill also amends the Aeronautics Act, the Railway Safety Act and the Canada Shipping Act, 2001, to provide that no regulation, order or other instrument made under any of those acts to prevent the introduction or spread of COVID-19 may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting a person from boarding an aircraft, a train or a vessel solely on the ground that they have not received a vaccine against that disease.
This bill was initiated by our leader before it was taken up by my colleague, the hon. member for Niagara West.
The right to one's own medical choices is sacrosanct. The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unparalleled challenge to daily life for all Canadians across all areas of life and business. In its haste to ensure Canada was able to weather the pandemic as well as possible, the government of the day made some decisions that ultimately had serious negative effects on thousands of Canadians across the country.
The pandemic was undoubtedly a scary time for all, but instead of working with understanding and compassion, the Liberal government employed rhetoric that was cruel to its opponents. In particular, those who were hesitant to receive COVID-19 vaccines were made to be ridiculed and were discriminated against.
We now have the chance to take a sober second look at the outcome and aftermath of the pandemic. While it can be argued that the vaccines helped many, the way the government mandated their use in certain areas cannot be repeated. I am speaking about mandating vaccines as a requirement for employment and travel.
Particularly when it became clear that the vaccines were not a silver bullet and could not stop the spread of COVID-19 wholesale, the serious restrictions put on unvaccinated Canadians became unconscionable. In August 2021, the Liberal government mandated vaccination against COVID-19 for all federal public servants, employees in federally regulated transport industries and passengers on commercial air travel, interprovincial rail service and cruise ships. In all, more than 1.235 million employees were subjected to that mandate, more than 8% of the total number of workers in Canada. Those who could not or would not receive the vaccine and did not have an exemption were put on unpaid leave or fired.
Thousands of Canadians were denied their rights to freedom of mobility. The charter grants them the freedom to enter and leave Canada, but for a period of almost three years, six million unvaccinated Canadians were trapped in their own country.
Certainly at the beginning of the pandemic, in the first three weeks, nobody knew what this was, how serious it was or what we should do. After three years, it was clear that people who were fully vaccinated, such as I am, could get and transmit COVID the same as the unvaccinated. All the members of this House, many of whom had COVID during this time, were busy flying back and forth and taking trains in the country, but the unvaccinated were unable to go anywhere. That was discrimination.
Thousands of Canadians were unable to see loved ones across the border. It was a situation I became well acquainted with in my border riding office. Families were split apart. Parents were unable to share custody of young children. Loved ones were unable to say goodbye to dying older parents on the basis of mandates not based on science.
I have people in my riding who are married to people who live just across the border. They were prevented from being with their spouses for years. This is just unacceptable.
Worse still, some workers who lost their jobs were ineligible for employment insurance benefits as of October 2021. Employment and Social Development Canada issued a notice at the time to enforce vaccine mandates to help them fill out records of employment, documents that are necessary in applying for the benefits. According to The Canadian Press, “The department said if an employee doesn't report to work or is suspended or terminated for refusing to comply with a vaccine mandate, the employer should indicate that they quit, took a leave of absence or were dismissed potentially disqualifying them from EI.” While indeed it is an employer's right to set the rules of conduct for their workplace, for the federal government to instruct the employer to deny employees Canadian government benefits they had paid into was wrong. How many Canadians suffered and how many families went without because of this direction?
The EI system is an insurance premium system. A person pays their premiums, qualifies with their hours and collects the benefit, yet at the same time that the government was handing out CERB cheques of $2,000 a month, it was preventing people who were terminated for not being vaccinated from getting any money at all.
Furthermore, a year ago in June, the government refused to repay employees who lost their jobs due to the mandate the first time. Reporting in the National Post at the time states: "The ... government says it will not repay any salary to federal public servants who were suspended since October because of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.” This was at the time the mandate was being lifted. This was after months of calls for the government to reverse the mandates, not only from me and my colleagues but also from the major public service unions, including PSAC, PIPSC and CAPE. All had filed policy grievances against the employer's vaccine mandate for federal bureaucrats. At the same time, many other countries had released and stopped their mandates, following the advice of the World Health Organization after it said they were not effective. It took the government much too long to reverse these policies after much harm had been done.
I must say that it was not just Conservatives who opposed these divisive policies that had been imposed by the Prime Minister and the government. A few Liberals even had the courage to call out the Prime Minister for his efforts to divide Canadians. The Liberal MP for Louis-Hébert said, "A decision was made to wedge, to divide, and to stigmatize," further saying, “I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions.” Even the former Liberal finance minister admitted that the Prime Minister used vaccines as a political wedge, saying, "I didn't see that as something that was helpful."
Today, millions of Canadians remain unvaccinated against COVID-19. We cannot allow the freedom of millions of people to make their personal medical decisions to ever be compromised again. We cannot discriminate against millions of people for their personal medical choices. We cannot stand in this House and say we stand up for Canadians while leaving out a significant portion of the population.
it is clear that this extreme restriction of freedoms must never happen again. Hopefully we will never see the like of another COVID-19 pandemic, but there could be other similar threats out there, and we need to be prepared. It cannot be our main line of defence against a pandemic to arbitrarily limit the rights and freedoms of its citizens.
This bill, Bill C-278, will help to ensure that. We must not limit employment or travel on the basis of vaccination. We must not limit the operations of our House of Commons or our federal public service or our important industries on the basis of vaccination; it must be down to the individual's choice.
I will share one example of something that happened in my riding of Sarnia—Lambton.
At the beginning of the pandemic, nurses were heroes on the front line. They wore their personal protective equipment and there were no vaccines. Then, subsequently, when the vaccines came forward, there was a vaccine mandate put in place. Even though all the nurses were wearing the same protective equipment and there was no science or evidence that there was any transmission and the unvaccinated ones were being tested every day, which gave even more of a guarantee, the unvaccinated ones were all fired. Four weeks after all the unvaccinated nurses left the facility, there was an outbreak of COVID-19 among the COVID-vaccinated nurses. What was accomplished was misery in many people's lives and nothing positive whatsoever.
It is time to replace the fear sowed by the Liberals with a new hope. We must take these lessons learned and enshrine them into law. We can have a Canada where personal medical choice is protected, a Canada with productive and profitable trade and travel. We can bring it home to your home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.
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- May/2/22 2:54:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are in a different place, but there are nearly four million Canadians whose charter rights are still being violated. They cannot leave or enter the country and cannot even travel domestically, even though all of the provinces have lifted their vaccine mandates. They are being prevented from visiting relatives, who in some cases are dying.
Will the transport minister admit that vaccinated and unvaccinated people can both get and transmit COVID and that there is no longer any justification for violating the charter rights of Canadians?
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- Mar/28/22 2:52:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, President Biden made exemptions to the vaccine mandates for truckers who drive solo and for companies with fewer than 100 employees. As part of the road map that the Prime Minister signed with the president, they agreed to match requirements at the border.
Will the Prime Minister look for that match to get exemptions for unvaccinated Canadian truckers in order that we can address the trucker shortage here in Canada?
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- Mar/24/22 1:27:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today. I will be splitting my time with the member for Peterborough—Kawartha.
I am glad to have an opportunity to speak to our Conservative motion, which reads:
That, given that Canada has one of the world's highest vaccination rates and every province across Canada has lifted or has a plan to lift vaccine mandates, the House call on the government to immediately lift all federal vaccine mandates in order to:
(a) protect the jobs of federally regulated employees;
(b) enable Canadians to travel unimpeded;
(c) ensure Canada's tourism industry recovery; and
(d) allow for the free flow of goods across the Canadian border.
Of course, before my colleagues across the way try to shame and attack me for various and sundry, let me give a full disclosure for the record. I have had my vaccinations and I have also had COVID-19 twice, once at the beginning of the pandemic and once at Christmastime. I also know quite a bit about science. I have been a chemical engineer for nearly 40 years, so I would like to approach this from a scientific point of view.
I will start by talking about the charter rights violations.
This government has trapped almost three million Canadians in the country. They cannot take a plane, they cannot take a train and they cannot cross at the land borders. There was a point in time when this would have been considered a reasonable measure, according to the medical health experts and the World Health Organization, because we were in the time of trying to control the transmission of the disease. However, with omicron, we are now at a place where the World Health Organization has said that omicron is everywhere. Therefore, these types of restrictions are no longer working, and that is the reason countries all over the world are opening up.
If we think about it, we have quite a high rate of vaccination in Canada, and those people can get and transmit COVID-19. I talked about having it myself. The Prime Minister had it. The member for Beauce had it. A lot of members in the House have had COVID-19, and we have all had our vaccines. Therefore, if we have almost 90% of those people going back and forth across the border, what is the additional risk of allowing another 10% of people who can get COVID-19 and transmit it from going back and forth across the border? There actually is no difference in risk from a science perspective. The government can no longer rely on section 1 of the charter, which allows it to temporarily infringe the charter rights of Canadians to freely come and go. That is one mandate that I would like to see dropped immediately.
The second thing I will talk about is the people who were fired for not being vaccinated.
First of all, I think this is just wrong on so many levels, but let us talk about it from a science perspective. Let us take a person who is a federal employee working from home who is vaccinated. What is the chance of that person spreading their germs to somebody in another building who is also working from home? The answer is, quite simply, there is zero risk. Now, if one is an unvaccinated federal worker who is working from home, what are the odds that this person is going to transfer their germs to somebody who is also working from home in another building? The answer from a science perspective is, again, there is zero risk, but those people were fired by this Liberal government. That is discriminatory. It is not based on science, and it is just one example of the many things this government has done to deliberately punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.
I have had many people approach my office who wanted to get an exemption because they had a history of stroke or a history of heart and kidney problems or other comorbidities. Originally, many of them received exemptions from their doctors, but then the Royal College of Physicians overturned all of those exemptions and threatened the medical licences of doctors in this country if they wrote exemptions for anything other than an anaphylactic reaction to the first vaccine. That is the reason many people were not able to get their exemptions, but they still had valid reasons for not taking the vaccine. I would like to see the federal government hire back every person it fired who is working from home regardless of vaccination status.
Now all provinces have started to lift their mandates. Let us take Ontario, for example. We have vaccinated and unvaccinated people whose children are going to school without masks, who are going to malls, who are eating in restaurants and who are all breathing the same air, so it is ridiculous to think that we have to protect them in some way in other places when they are already exposed. That is why, for all these mandates that have to do with the requirements on planes and trains and keeping unvaccinated people out of that line, the science is not there. These people are already exposed to omicron, just like the vaccinated. Everybody can get it and transmit it, so that needs to go.
With respect to the things causing problems at the border, let us talk about ArriveCAN and the ability to input all of that stuff. Some people do not have cellphones. A lot of seniors are not computer literate. What is the increased risk of exposure to COVID‑19 if the federal government eliminated the need for ArriveCAN today? What is the difference? There is no scientific risk of increased COVID exposure related to an application. It can get rid of it today, and I suggest it does.
At the same time, I am very concerned about some of the privacy invasions that happened during the COVID‑19 pandemic. We have seen privacy issues that have been put forward to the Privacy Commissioner. We have also seen the digital tracking of Canadians. I am concerned about those things as well.
Some members may know that at the beginning, when we returned to this parliamentary session, I was quite passionately standing up for civil liberties. I had meetings with MPs who had their concerns. I happened to keep the paper with the list of things we wanted to see addressed, so I thought I would tick these off one at a time.
There was the elimination of the PCR test for vaxxed and asymptomatic people. I am glad to see that was removed. There was no scientific evidence that it was needed, so that went away. I talked about ArriveCAN and the rules at the border. With respect to those things as well, there is no scientific merit to keep them in place. They are not going to prevent the spread of omicron and need to go. There were the medical privacy violations. I just spoke about that one. Then there was trapping Canadians in their own country. I just spoke about that one. Finally, there was the firing of the unvaxxed, and I just spoke about that one.
I would like to share a little story. In my own riding of Sarnia—Lambton, Bluewater Health fired 18 medical workers and forced 300, under duress, to take the vaccine or lose their jobs. Four weeks after it did that, there was an outbreak of COVID‑19 among the vaccinated medical staff. What was accomplished? It was absolutely nothing but misery for the 18 families of the people who lost their jobs.
Keep in mind that these are health care workers who, from the beginning of the pandemic, were dealing with COVID on the front lines with their personal protective equipment. Nobody was vaccinated then and they were considered heroes. Then, fast-forward, they were fired. Really, they were the safer ones. They were getting rapid-tested every day and wearing their PPE, whereas the vaccinated ones who ended up having the outbreak were not. Therefore, we can see that all of these mandates are intended to discriminate and punish, but they are not based on science and they do not accomplish anything.
I do not think we need to talk about the provincial mandates. There are plenty enough at the federal level so we do not need to bring a lot of that in, but it is the same sort of thing. We need to look at the World Health Organization, which is recommending that we drop these mandates. We need to look at the other countries that have opened up. We need to look at the U.S., where 40 states have dropped all of their mandates. We need to look at the provinces, which have all dropped or are dropping their mandates.
The current government needs to get rid of these things immediately. We all want to work together. The people who are vulnerable will want to continue to protect themselves, and I support that, but at this point in time we need to learn to get on with our lives. We need to stop punishing people. We need to stop violating their charter rights.
Together, we will be better prepared for the next pandemic when it arrives.
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