- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Vancouver Centre
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 57%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $106,078.52
- Government Page
moved that Bill S-209, An Act respecting Pandemic Observance Day, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
She said: Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to move and speak to the bill on pandemic observance day. It was moved in the Senate by the hon. Senator Marie-Françoise Mégie, and was adopted by the Senate on May 12.
I know we all have “days of everything”, but I want to talk about why this is important and relevant. We need to bring an end to COVID-19 everywhere on the planet. There have been 6.5 million deaths worldwide and over 620 million cases of COVID. It is still considered to be a pandemic by the World Health Organization, even though all of us do not want it to be.
We need to help Canadians grieve and commemorate the efforts in getting through the pandemic. Over 45 thousand Canadians have died from COVID. More than 100 Canadians died from COVID last week in Canada.
We also need to reflect on ways to prepare for future pandemics.
Why March 11? On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization first characterized the coronavirus, the COVID-19 epidemic, as a global pandemic.
How should people commemorate on March 11? We are not going to try to prescribe any ways of doing this. I know the senator who originally moved the bill in the Senate feels it should be up to all Canadians and organizations to choose how and why they observe it and do it in the manner that is more relevant to their community, their needs and their province. The bill would not create a paid holiday.
This is very relevant to the health of people in Canada. It is our government's top priority. We know that it is still a real pandemic. The World Health Organization has not declared it over. We know that this virus has had an uncanny ability to mutate and evolve. Right now, omicron BA.4 and BA.5 are already in the northern hemisphere where we live.
As we close our houses in the fall and we are all inside, the risk of having another wave is very high. In the summer, we could be outside and that was helpful to us, but now that we are inside, we need to take care of ourselves.
The problem is that even though we have removed travel requirements, the Public Health Agency of Canada's chief officer has told everyone to please wear a mask, to get vaccinated and get boosted. We now know there is a new bivalent vaccine available to people, which might be helpful against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants. Our government has delivered all sorts of treatments that may be available if one does get COVID.
Recent studies show that for people who had COVID, even though it was mild, there is something called long COVID. These persons, even though they had a mild attack, would be subject down the road and over the years to chronic diseases. They will not be as healthy as they would have been. They can get all kinds of other diseases. For the sake of everyone's protection, try to follow what the Public Health Agency has asked people to do.
The Public Health Agency of Canada continues to ask Canadians to get their vaccinations, and I know a lot of people do not want get them. Nobody is forcing people to get vaccinated, but the thing about getting vaccinated is that it protects not only those getting it but it protects others around them. It also protects others in our communities who may be immunocompromised, who may have a chronic illness, who may be receiving cancer treatments or who may have all those things going on for them at the same time and be very susceptible.
Since the beginning of COVID-19, Canada has done very well. The reason we did was because we had vaccines, and many Canadians, more than any other country in the world, got vaccinated. That prevented us from having the sorts of results and outcomes that we saw in the United States, where millions of people contracted the disease and died from it.
We were lucky because we followed the rules and protocols. The thing about public health, pandemics and epidemics is that they are not going away. They will be here with us for a long time. It is the globalization of this. People are travelling. They are going everywhere in the world, visiting any country, going for holidays anywhere they want, and when they do that, they are subject to whatever little epidemic is going on in a country and they bring it back. That is how pandemics spread.
We know about the great flu pandemic in the 1900s, which killed a lot of people. We know better now. We know what we can do. We need to be reminded, always, every year at this time, even if we do not get a massive wave in the fall of this year, even though we may have all escaped and we are being vaccinated and are doing everything else, that this is not going to be our last pandemic. There are going to be various pandemics.
This one spreads by aerosol; in other words, it spreads in the air. That is why one of the things we need to do if we are in a closed room is open windows and ventilate the room as best we can, turning on fans to ensure the air is circulating. That is an important way to prevent us from breathing in this virus.
I am speaking right now at home because I am not particularly well, so I am doing this virtually, and I am not wearing a mask. However, if I were in the House, I would be wearing one. I would be speaking, and the drops from my mouth would be floating in the air and could infect other people in the room.
We want people to remember this pandemic in order to protect ourselves and others. The next pandemic we face may not be borne by aerosol; it may be contact, it may be sexually transmitted or it may be spread by feces and gastrointestinal products. Pandemics infect people in a lot of ways.
The thing about public health is that it first finds out what is causing the pandemic. Once we have found out what the bacteria or virus as in this case of COVID, we are then able to decide how it is spread. Then we take the precautions with regard to how we get it from each other. Those precautions will be different depending on whatever the pandemic spread is.
We want to remember pandemics. We need to remember that they are going to be with us. We need to remember that we are living in a new world now, post-COVID, and we need to be careful. We need to care about others in our community, our loved ones, friends and people we do not even know, who live nearby. It is the only way we will be able to stop pandemics from spreading, to nip them in the bud and to end them as soon as we can.
This one has stayed for a long time because, as I said earlier on, this virus seems to have the uncanny ability to mutate, change, evolve and take different forms, so the vaccines that people get would not be as effective. We also know that vaccines have a time period after which they are not as potent and as strong a protection as they used to be. That is why we are doing the boosters.
We need to remind ourselves of what we have faced. I have talked about the tens of millions of people around the world who have died from this pandemic. This is not where we want to go. We have seen the outcomes of this pandemic. This pandemic created all kinds of economic restraints. Women were mostly affected by this pandemic. They were forced to stay home or quit their jobs. That individual family economic balance was disrupted. Women were also at the front lines as nurses or doctors. Many other women were working the hospitals and in the communities.
This pandemic not only affected women, but it also affected children and seniors, who tend to be immunocompromised because they have chronic illnesses. They have diabetes, chronic lung disease or heart disease, and this makes them more susceptible to getting COVID.
Some people may take medications because they have an autoimmune problem. Those medications alone could bring down their immunity and they could become what is known as an immunocompromised person.
I would be the first to say I am an immunocompromised person. I take a medication for an autoimmune disease that is at the top of the list for causing one to be immunocompromised. That is one of the reasons why I am very careful and follow the protocols. We need to remind ourselves of that. We need to remind ourselves that we are living in a different world. Therefore, observing this day is important, not just for our protection but we need to thank all those people on the front lines, who are now burnt out.
We need to look at what could happen to our hospitals if we have another pandemic or we have another COVID wave this fall. We need to know that we cannot cope anymore. Our systems were so beaten by COVID–19 over those two years that we do not have the ability to rebound in a way we used to. People are burned out. Some people no longer want to be front-line workers. Doctors and nurses no longer want to work in the system. These are the things a pandemic observance day would help us remember, that we must care for our system that has served us so well over such a long time, but is now under stress and is cracking and breaking.
People who live in our communities do not want to go to a hospital emergency room because it is so overcrowed. They cannot get in or cannot get a bed. All of these safety responses have changed and we need to be able to respond to them differently. This is a reminder that we need to care for our system itself, the whole way in which we have to respond.
A lot of people remember what happened when we, as a government, had to suddenly spend billions of dollars to help people who had lost their jobs, to help them keep a roof over their heads and pay their rent. We saw a large number of people visiting food banks. The community impact of this pandemic on families and people has been horrendous.
An observance day would remind us of this. It would remind us that we need to understand the impact of any pandemic, not just COVID. It would also remind us of what we may need to do in the future to react as soon as it happens, to have the resources to help the pharmaceutical companies create vaccines and to build our own vaccine ability in Canada so we do not have to beg other people to give us vaccines. We need to become self-sufficient and resilient, so we need not to have to do the things we did, such as going into lockdown and stopping people from going to work. We should not have to do all of those things, because we would have learned from this and built in new ways to cope and protect ourselves, and to prevent what happened with COVID–19.
A pandemic observance day would help us learn from what happened in the past. If we do not learn our lesson, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes we made earlier. Science has said that if we keep doing the same things over, such as denying that we are living in a pandemic, even though we do not like it, we are going to keep repeating the same mistakes. To continually repeat the same thing over and over is the definition of insanity. This would help us not feel as powerless as we felt during the pandemic. An observance day will help us remember. It will help us build a new and create resilience in our country, our communities and among ourselves. It will help us look at how we deal with long-term care facilities where seniors were getting COVID even though everyone was trying very hard to prevent it. The ventilation systems were carrying COVID throughout those buildings. We are going to have to learn how to build that kind of resilience in the future, so our seniors are not as vulnerable as they were.
I want to thank the members and hope they will support this Senate bill. It is really important for us to move forward to be resilient and to build a new Canada post-COVID.
2196 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/19/22 9:07:34 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I must say that I have been embarrassed for a long time about what has been going on in the country, especially in Ottawa. I have had a lot of friends across the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe who have been calling me, asking, “What is going on in Canada? You guys are such a great democracy; what's happening?”, and so I have been embarrassed. They were in shock at what was going on here.
In many countries, there were copycats doing what the protesters were doing here, and I must tell members that those copycats were quelled immediately with water cannons, guns and tear gas, to keep them in line. However, what makes me proud of my country is that, in the last two days, we did not do that. The police in this country were restrained; they were professional and they were patient. They were taking abuse, both verbal and physical, and they also had people reach in to try to get their guns. They were mindful of the children in the group; children who were being used as frontline shields. I have no idea what kinds of parents would do that, but this was a way to make everybody see that they were nice and that they had little children. The children were in the front lines, though. Those are the kinds of things we saw going on here, and the police were very careful and worried about the children.
We are asking the question: Why use this Emergencies Act? I have to say that it is pretty easy to see why when we saw the city of Ottawa being occupied for 22 days, and not just by peaceful people who were sitting down singing Kumbaya, but by people who were threatening, verbally harassing and physically intimidating people wearing masks and people of visible minorities, who were scared. Some protesters had volatile materials like gasoline and diesel and were wandering around the city. They were setting off fireworks in a city that has huge high-rises without care or worry whether they would ignite something in the city. They were lawless, and that is the only word I can use. Well, if that is not enough reason to invoke the Emergencies Act in this country, then I do not know what is.
We talked a lot about the rule of law, and I have heard everybody invoking the rule of law. Canada is doing exactly that. This is a country of various jurisdictions under our Constitution. The federal government does not, like a great, wondrous matriarch, walk in and impose on every single municipality or province whatever its will is. It cannot do that. Therefore, what it had to do was to try to give the municipalities and provinces the tools they needed to empower them to be able to deal with the lawlessness, and that is exactly what this Emergencies Act is doing: It is helping municipalities and provinces to have the tools they need.
I have listened to the mayor of Ottawa saying today that they could not get tow trucks. The tow truck drivers did not want to come, because they were scared. They did not want to come in and tow the rigs that were hanging around. However, with the Emergencies Act, the tow trucks were told that they had to come and do that. Now, that is one simple example of how the resources and tools that the police needed had to come through the Emergencies Act.
The Emergencies Act also helps provinces and municipalities take on certain roles that they would not normally take on; for example, the ability for police to come from across the country, including from my own riding, the Vancouver Police Department, of which I am inordinately proud, to help Ottawa. There is the ability to follow the money, find out what foreign entities were funding this anarchy that was going on in our city for 22 days, find out who was sending money to whom and follow cryptocurrency, which was an important part of finding out that there were foreign entities behind all of this.
I heard people on the streets, when the police were moving them back, talking about their First Amendment rights and saying, “You cannot arrest this person; you did not read them their Miranda rights.” Come on, guys, do people not watch enough television to know that we do not do that in Canada? That is not Canadian, so we know that there were foreign entities in this country, manipulating what was going on.
Who is funding them? Who is paying for them? Where does a person get money to spend 22 days, with food, drink and everything they need? Somebody is paying for that. We have to find out who that is.
People talk about sovereignty. Part of that sovereignty is that Canada cannot allow foreign entities to dictate what we do in our democracy. This is a democracy, and in a democracy we have elected governments. I do not care what stripe the government is, but it is elected according to free and fair elections, which is a major part of a democracy. To try to overthrow duly elected officials by mob rule of law, threats and intimidation is anarchy. It cannot be allowed. If these people do not want the government anymore, they have the right to vote against the government in an election. That is what a democracy is about.
A democracy has free media and freedom of the press. The press has been intimidated, harassed, pushed, shoved, threatened and frightened, and I want to take my hat off to all of the press, who have been doing the yeomen's work, who have been unafraid and who have been doing what they need to do, because if the media is shut down, we really do not know what is happening and we are prone to listening to disinformation and false news.
These are some of the things we are talking about here, and I have to say that when the police kept saying to people to move on and get the children out of here, I looked at what was going in Coutts and at some of these border protests. At the Ambassador Bridge there was a line in front of the protesters, of children linking arms. What country are we in when we do that to children and use them as shields to protect so-called “protesters”. There is a dual reason for it. Not only are children shields, because they know nobody will harm children, but also it makes them look nice, quiet, family-oriented and all that kind of thing. That is not what is true. We are seeing this kind of manipulation and intimidation of media.
I must say that we know how much money there is. We look at the border crossings that have been blocked by the trucks, and 95% of our truckers are vaccinated and are going back and forth, bringing food, medicines and everything. We have the ones who did not want to be vaccinated, but freedom applies both ways. Freedom of choice means if someone does not choose to get vaccinated or does not choose to wear masks, they accept the consequences. I taught my kids that. My parents taught me that. We have a choice, but with a choice comes consequences. If, by doing it, it is felt that someone is actually harming others by exposing others to infection, then this is something the government must hear about.
When people say they are blocking truckers who are trying to get across the border to bring food and medicines and to keep trade going, which I think was about $511 million a day when we count all the crossings, this is intimidation. This is not about truckers. This is not about vaccine mandates. This is about anarchy, and I think we need to remember that. For someone to say they will bring down a duly elected government and to use language that is threatening to our Prime Minister, who is duly elected, and when people hug and stand there taking photographs with these people, they are also agreeing that it is okay for mob rule to take down a duly elected government.
It is not a democracy when people do that. We can look at the judges. We have an independent judiciary, and the independent judiciary is now issuing all kinds of writs against the people who have broken the law. Again, we come back to the rule of law. It cannot be had both ways. One cannot talk about rule of law on one hand, and then, when we impose rule of law because of the jurisdictional issues that make us have to do that, say we are breaking the law or imposing a dictatorship. That is not true. A dictator is someone who stops other people from having their freedoms. The protesters did that. They stopped everybody else from having the freedom to wear a mask, the freedom to go to a hospital to get care, the freedom to take their children to school and the freedom to go and shop. Occupiers closed down businesses. Businesses had to close their doors. They were walking into restaurants, intimidating and roughing up, both verbally and physically, waiters, waitresses and the people who were there.
This is not a lawful, peaceful protest, and today, when everyone was singing the national anthem and saying to the police, “We love you,” this is part of a propaganda machine, saying, “Look at us; we are nice people. Look at us; we have a bouncy castle and our children play. We are nice people.”
All of us sitting in the House of Commons must know this not to be true. We know what is happening—
1659 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, it is very important to know what the plan of action is. A plan of action is not one that tries to second-guess a virus, which we cannot do because it has behaved very erratically, and viruses do that.
The bottom line is to ask how many people we can prevent from getting this virus. We need to look at vaccination as a first step in a plan; the plan is vaccination. The next plan is to try to isolate people wherever possible so the spread is contained. Those are some of the things we plan.
We do not plan as a partisan issue. We plan according to what we must do when we have a pandemic, whether it be the flu at the beginning of the 20th century or the plague. A plan is based on what we know, on the science and what has been shown over generations about how to deal with viruses or bacteria, if they happen to be the source of the pandemic. That is a plan. It is a scientific plan. It is not a plan that says we are going to second-guess and say that on March 4, 2022, the virus is going to go away. One cannot tell people that because we do not know that.
Something we have seen with this virus is that it has fooled us over and over again. A plan, for me, is to follow the protocols that every good public health professional has understood from the beginning of the 20th century. What do we do, how do we do it and how do we prevent people from dying?
276 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to finish that thought. Vaccines do convey natural immunity. Where do people think immunity comes from? Someone gets antibodies in response to an antigen. In this case the RNA of the virus will actually cause someone to develop antibodies. Our bodies develop antibodies.
The point is there are many people who are immunocompromised. There are many people with chronic illnesses who do not how susceptible they will be. I, as a physician, am not prepared to roll the dice on whether someone has natural immunity or not. The bottom line is to try and make as many people as immune as we possibly can so we can decrease the damage done.
We still do not even know the long-term effects for people who are getting omicron. We may be getting milder forms. We do not know what is happening long term. A lot of countries are now saying there may be chronic long-term problems.
161 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to answer that question. Viruses are unpredictable, as we have seen with this virus. Omicron wants to get to as many people as it can to spread itself. Its spread has been decreasing with vaccinations. Fewer and fewer people are getting it. Its spread therefore has become more mild mostly because a lot of people are already vaccinated and have had booster shots. Therefore, they have some degree of immunity and are not getting as sick as they could have. That is the first reason.
Omicron right now is spreading rapidly, but is milder in certain people, but we do not know whether that is only because of vaccines or whether it is the next iteration, B.1. I do not know whether that comes up. Maybe it is far more lethal and it has a lot of problems. We do not understand that, because we do not know and we cannot predict that until it happens.
The other thing is are we going to wait to see if people have natural immunity? This is a case of saying I am going to roll the dice and if someone does not have natural immunity and they happen to die from omicron because they are 80 or older and they die from it, then that was a mistake. I thought that person had immunity. The bottom line is to give—
Mrs. Cathay Wagantall: That is a good use of a vaccine.
247 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, in this House we listen to partisanship constantly. We listen to people yelling at each other, calling each other names and ignoring the issue on the table just in order to be partisan. The hon. member for Vancouver Kingsway made me proud tonight. He was non-partisan. He was clear. He talked about the science. He talked about the facts. He smoked out all of the partisanship and the hypocrisy.
This is an important bill, yet we hear everyone going off on tangents about everything other than a very simple bill. COVID-19, omicron or whatever form it is going to mutate into, kills people. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians have died as a result of it. They were preventable deaths. We are talking about dealing with preventing death here. We are not talking about transfer payments and whatever else people want to do as a red herring. Let us just talk about our having the power to help to save lives. Let us talk about how we do it. I want to congratulate the hon. member for Vancouver Kingsway.
When there is a pandemic, there are some very simple things to do. The first thing we have to do is find out what the vector is, what is causing it, and how it is spread. In this case, we thought originally it was spread by droplet infection. We now know it is spread by aerosol. How it is spread is important for us to understand. The second thing we need to find out is how we get vaccines against it and how, if we can, prevent people from getting it. Containing the spread is an important part of it.
The federal government has been giving out rapid tests since October 2020, for a year and five months. I am not being partisan about this. It bothers me that my Province of British Columbia was given seven million free tests by the Government of Canada and no one knows how the tests are being handed out. British Columbians keep writing to me saying they cannot get a test to save their life and do not know where to find them. At the same time, I have grandchildren in Ontario who can get rapid tests at school and bring them home.
Let us talk about saving lives here. Let us talk about dealing with a virus that does not really care what political party we belong to or what province we live in. It does not give a hoot about the Constitution. It does not care about legislation or anything. It is a virus and it knows how to do only one thing, and that is to spread and make people ill. The longer it stays with us, the more we are going to see it change, evolve and mutate into different forms. Right now, we all think of omicron, that it is easy to pick up. Omicron is actually very mild.
On the other hand, we need to talk about why we should have rapid tests and what the importance of rapid tests is in this. We have identified the vector. We have decided how it is spread. We have decided we are going to contain it. We have vaccines. We have treatments ready. The question then is what the rapid tests are going to do. We know the tests are not always very reliable, but the important thing that rapid tests do is the third part of public health protocol, and that is surveillance and tracking.
If we can find out where omicron is, or B.1 or whatever the new strain is, we are able to do not only a widespread, scattered approach, but we can look at that little town, little village, little space or little part of the city where there are more positive tests. Surveillance is a part of public health. It is a part of looking at a pandemic. They get surveillance and track it. The federal government put in a tracking mechanism, an app. Most provinces ignored it and the app became useless because nobody was tracking. Surveillance went by the board. Surveillance is key to knowing where to expend the resources and where they are going to find the virust spread so as to be able to curb it. It is scientific. It is a simple, basic method.
Therefore, it is important that we get rapid tests out to everyone as soon as possible. Yes, it helps people if they want to visit their grandma to know that they are okay and that they will not give her omicron. That is all very good, but the bottom line is it is important for surveillance and for tracking. Because we did not have an app that everybody used, there was a problem.
Again, I want to say that I am certainly not being partisan tonight. I am talking about Ontario having done one good thing. My daughter-in-law who lives in Ontario went out one day with her friends. They went for dinner. It was the friend's birthday, and there were three of them. When she got home, she got a message from the app in Ontario, the same federal app we are talking about, which told her she may have been in a room with and in touch with people with omicron.
The next day she went for her proper PCR test, not a rapid test. She went out. She isolated herself. She was able to take those kind of steps. This is what these protocols are for. This is why it does not matter how it is spread. It does not matter what is happening in the pandemic. These are some basic steps in epidemiology and in looking at pandemics, which began at the beginning of the 20th century when we first discovered public health, and we began to understand how to track things.
This is not a silly thing. There is nothing to study. This is real. The facts are there. This is the science that has been around since the early part of the 20th century, and we need to use it. We need to care about how we can prevent lives being lost. I am a physician. The idea that people could die from a preventable death bothers me to no end. It really does. I lose sleep at night over this. It really bothers me because it is in our power to do the right thing.
In my province of British Columbia, 92% of people have had a vaccination, so we can see that people do care. They want to do the right thing, yet we have people in the Conservative Party talking about how we should have no more vaccine mandates and no more whatever. Obviously, there is no understanding of what science is about, what public health is about, when it started, how it started, how it is tracked or how it works.
The most important thing we should be worried about is how to stop the spread and how to save lives. I support this bill. I would love for us to stop talking about everything else and just focus. Let us get this thing passed. Let us get the rapid tests going.
Hundreds of thousands are going to be done. Yes, it is money spent, but that money is important, because saving lives has got to be the number one priority for any government, anywhere, anyhow. Any party that wants to be in government has got to think about that.
1261 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
