44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 14, 2022 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I was wondering if the hon. member could comment on the apparent NDP-Liberal coalition we have going on here and the vote we had earlier today on our opposition day motion, in which the NDP supported the Liberal government and voted against that motion.
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Mr. Speaker, I will answer that question. However, that is an example of what I was talking about and what the hon. member from Vancouver Kingsway was talking about.
Once again, it is the politics of the thing. It is, “Oh, look at the coalition. Look at how they are getting into bed.” This is science. Everywhere one goes, regardless of their political party, if they understand the science, they will agree with this. This is not about getting into bed with someone and forming coalitions. That is the kind of low-grade partisanship that actually puts people's lives on the line because it is more important to be political than to get the right things done.
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Mr. Speaker, perhaps it is because it is very late in the day today, February 14, but I am somewhat shocked.
I am especially shocked by my colleague, who is so knowledgeable. She said that they want to save lives and prevent senseless deaths, so why did people on my street have to go through triaging because health care services were not available? It is because there was not enough money, not because they did not have access to a test. I agree with having tests.
I am just trying to understand. We heard several times that partisanship is at play, but I believe that the Bloc Québécois should not be included in that because it is the only party that is not looking for power. We are here to protect Quebec's interests, which means we will support what is good for Quebec.
I would like to hear from my colleague, who is the expert. It sounded like she was saying that with respect to the health transfers, the triaging and deaths that occurred were not part of it.
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Mr. Speaker, I think this is hilarious. In the first instance, the member spoke tonight about provincial jurisdictions. The provinces are being given these rapid tests. They are being shipped to them. We are actually seeking in this bill to get them shipped directly to provinces, so provinces can distribute them.
If the hon. member cannot find them in her province, she is going to have to ask her provincial government why they have received so many hundreds of millions of tests they they have not distributed yet. That has to be my answer. We cannot have it both ways.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciated listening to the member's speech tonight. The fact that she is a physician gives her an opportunity to explain a number of things to Canadians. Of course, saving lives is key to any physician and I really appreciate her passion for that. Could she explain something?
She said omicron was less infectious, but spread more. I wonder how the member would answer this. The nature of a virus is that it wants to survive. What is the member's understanding of the role of a virus that initially comes out very strong, then eventually becomes far more contagious but less dangerous? That is what has happened here.
I would like the member to speak to the fact that emergency vaccines are required only when it is determined that there are no available early treatments to prevent people from getting to the place where they are in ICUs and on ventilators. What is her view of the importance of recognizing how a virus mutates?
I would also like to hear her view on natural immunity. Before we provide vaccines, should that not be determined and find out how many people have very strong T cells and natural immunity capability?
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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.
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- Feb/14/22 11:17:16 p.m.
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Order. I know it is late at night. I know we have not been using Zoom for very long. Let us just make sure that we allow the member to answer. Then we will go back and forth as we normally do.
The hon. member for Vancouver Centre has the microphone.
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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.
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- Feb/14/22 11:18:33 p.m.
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I hate to cut things off, but we have to get a few more questions in before the time runs out.
The hon. member for Peace River—Westlock.
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Mr. Speaker, it is not often we get to go twice in a debate like this, so I am appreciative of that.
The hon. member talked about the science of this. The motion we put forward last week called for the government to put forward a plan, give us some benchmarks or give us some timelines, and show us the science of when we will break out of this pandemic and when we will be able to lift the mandates.
Would the hon. member like to tell us, according to her plan, how many people would have to be vaccinated in her ideal world for the mandates to be dropped and for life to return to some semblance of normal?
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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?
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Mr. Speaker, two weeks to flatten the curve, do we remember that being said? Two weeks to flatten the curve is what we all signed up for around here back in the spring of 2020, two years ago.
Here we are two years later and we still do not have a plan for how we are going to pull out of this pandemic. We put forward a motion last week calling on the government to provide us with a plan. We left it fairly wide open. We asked for a plan for how we would end the mandates and return to some semblance of normal.
The Liberals joined with their coalition partners, the NDP, and voted that motion down, so here we are without a plan for how to end the pandemic. We heard about the vaccines and we called for rapid tests, which is what we are talking about tonight, but here we are without a plan.
The Liberals could have voted for our motion earlier today and could have put forward a plan. We gave them a month to come up with a plan. They have essentially had two years to come up with a plan, and one of the major frustrations from people across the country is that there does not seem to be a plan. We seem to be flying by the seat of our pants.
There is also no humility in this to say that the government actually does not know. That would be an acceptable plan to give, but the government keeps saying it is following the science. Show us the science. Use the science and build a plan. Give us a percentage. We have heard things like “when 70% of the population is vaccinated”, “when 80% of the population is vaccinated” or “when 90% of the population is vaccinated”. Those are all nice targets, but that is kind of like shooting a hole in the target and then painting the bull's eye around the hole we just shot.
If we do not know what the target is, it is pretty hard to have a plan. It is hard to have an idea. As well, the goalposts keep changing. The target keeps changing. The bullet hole is there and we have painted the bull's eye around it. That is essentially where we are at with this whole COVID-19 pandemic.
It has been two years. We have seen jurisdictions around the world removing their vaccination mandates, removing their travel restrictions and opening up their sports arenas. They are watching hockey again and having a good time. Here we are in Canada behind plexiglass and masks and all of these things while other parts of the world are—
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Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, the member has been speaking for three minutes and has not talked about rapid tests once yet. This is a debate about rapid tests. I urge the Speaker to try to get him back into the lane.
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- Feb/14/22 11:24:18 p.m.
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I thank the minister for that, but the member did mention rapid tests at least once in his speech so far. We have given lots of leeway in our debate tonight to all sides. I will make sure the member keeps to the bill at hand, and I am sure this nudging will keep him there.
The hon. member for Peace River—Westlock may continue.
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Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that we have given the government the opportunity with this motion last week for a dramatic out, a way to reduce the pressure in this country around the two years that this country has been under moving goalposts and shooting first and then drawing a bullseye on the target after the fact. Here we are today asking the government for a target before we get to the plate.
Today, the bill before us is very straightforward. It talks about getting rapid tests. We have been asking for rapid tests for over two years. We were asking for rapid tests before there was a decent vaccine on the market, before we had approvals for the vaccine. Why? There were cutting-edge Canadian companies that were showing up in this place and telling us they had a rapid test that we could use if only they could get Health Canada's approval.
I remember writing a letter asking the health minister to expedite the testing of these rapid tests so that we could use them. Why? It was so that we could maintain our border. One of the first things that we learned in a pandemic was to shut the borders and try to keep the pandemic out. What did the government do? It called shutting the border racist. Had we had rapid tests at the border, we could have tested people and significantly reduced the effects of people coming from overseas and bringing COVID-19 here. We would have been able to quarantine the sick rather than quarantining everybody. Quarantining is for the sick. It is not for the healthy.
That was one of the major frustrations that we saw, these ham-fisted practices that went on, putting people in these “rape hotels” across the country after they came in to ensure that they were not spreading COVID to other people, in worse conditions than many of the prisons in this country, worse food for sure. Forgive me when I am not willing to grant the Liberals a lot of leeway on this bill around rapid tests when we have been calling for them for a very long time.
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Mr. Speaker, I have a point of order. I really hope that I misheard my colleague in his description of the quarantine hotels. As someone who has been helping put forward a motion on gender-based violence, if it was referred to as a “rape hotel”, I find that profoundly offensive to women not only in the House but in this country. I would ask that the member apologize.
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- Feb/14/22 11:28:01 p.m.
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It is not necessarily against the rules of the House to refer to certain things but maybe the member could retract the statement or maybe explain it a little. I do accept that maybe it is improper.
The hon. member for Peace River—Westlock.
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Mr. Speaker, I will rephrase that. I apologize for any offence I may have given.
I will rephrase that. We placed returning visitors to Canada in places where there was no gender-based analysis done upon their return to Canada. We heard horrific stories of things that happened in those places. I am adamant that one of the things we could have used to prevent people from ending up in those quarantine hotels was rapid tests. Rapid tests were one of the ways that we could have reduced the influx of COVID into our own country, and it was one of the ways we could have managed the border. Those were things that we called for early on, very early on.
Other things that we have seen with this pandemic is the mismanagement of our PPE stockpile. After SARS there was an effort in this country to stockpile PPE. In 2017, those stockpiles were no longer funded. They were in disarray. They were not managed. There we were when 2020 came around and we had a pandemic but we did not have a stockpile of PPE. That goes to show that I do not have faith in the Liberal government's ability to manage vast numbers of these products.
The other thing that we are concerned about with this particular $2.5-billion bill is who is going to supply these particular rapid tests. I have already talked significantly about rapid test companies that have approached my office. They probably approached every member's office in this place, showed the tests and said, “Hey, we are a Canadian company. We are a cutting-edge, health technology company in this country and we think we've developed a rapid test for COVID.” That was early on in 2020. We said, “Okay, this is great. We will put it forward and promote it” and those kinds of things, yet we never saw them get approved. I do not know. They went to the United States and other jurisdictions and those same rapid tests were approved in those jurisdictions, but they were not approved in ours.
Then we saw similar things happen with vaccines. We saw the Government of Canada sign up with a company called CanSino. It spent millions of dollars on that particular project, only to abandon it later. Never mind the Baylis Medical fiasco. I am not sure if colleagues remember that one. Ventilators that were not approved by Health Canada were bought. Several thousand of them were bought by the Canadian government to be stockpiled for the pandemic. I do not begrudge that, but there was a member of Parliament named Frank Baylis who happened to be associated with Baylis Medical. Somehow that company got this multi-million dollar contract to provide ventilators to fight the pandemic. There are multiple examples of why we would have questions about the suppliers of the rapid tests. Never mind the WE scandal. In the middle of the pandemic, we had the WE scandal where the Prime Minister was trying to give his buddies nearly a billion dollars.
Here we are with a $2.5-billion new spending bill and we have questions about who will be the suppliers. We have seen this movie played before. We have watched it. We had the WE scandal. We had the CanSino disaster. We had the Baylis Medical thing. We have seen that.
Other countries around the world, though, have had a great record with rapid tests. Germany, for example, adopted rapid tests very early on and have used them extensively.
Here we are at the last minute, in what are, I hope, the dying days of this pandemic, and suddenly we are rushing the bill through Parliament. We are not sending the bill to committee. We are just rushing it through Parliament, and for what? I am not exactly certain why. Is it to distract from the Liberals' disastrous vote for a plan to end the mandates? Is it because they are embarrassed about that and want to hide from it, so they put this on the table and then tell us to jump through all the hoops?
It is still Monday, the first day of the week, although it may be getting close to Tuesday, and the Liberals brought this to Parliament, out of all the things we have to be concerned about today, never mind the special Emergencies Act and things like that going on. Suddenly, after two years of asking for this, today of all days, here we are having to ram this through, and we are not using the normal means of Parliament, but a programming motion to ram this through Parliament to bring it to the Senate, which is not sitting for another week. The committee could hear it, sit down and ask questions of the government specifically, such as who the suppliers are and where the money is going. Let us get a schedule of where the $2.5 billion is being spent and let us have a plan. Perhaps somebody on the Liberal side can explain to me why, today of all days, suddenly this bill has to be debated and programmed through and have multiple votes on it.
I would like to congratulate the clerk for her amazing ability to remember all of our names for those. Even though, because of the COVID rules, I sat in different seats today, she still managed to get my name right. I congratulate her on that.
Nonetheless, it still begs the question: Why today? What was the science that brought us to today? Fundamentally, I think rapid tests are important, were important, and would have been a real help in the fight against COVID early on.
I know that my own province of Alberta was using rapid tests. They were handed out at school and my kids took them home. We very much enjoyed having rapid tests to be able to have that peace of mind. However, there is no recording of those rapid tests. There is no data collection. They are used, and they give me and my family peace of mind, but then they go in the garbage. There is no data collection. They are an incredible tool for individuals to use, but not beyond that.
We have heard members on the other side talking about collecting the data and all these kinds of things, and that is great, but if a person is self-administering it, there really is no data collection, unless there are some digital ones that I do not know about. The ones that I have used are analog outfits that do not collect data and do not have a time-stamp on them. They are good for my own personal peace of mind, but not necessarily useful in tracking and tracing.
It would have been useful for going to events, crossing borders and those kinds of things. They would have been extremely useful two years ago. Here again, we see that the Liberals are a day late, and seem to have another reason for bringing this forward today other than them being concerned about rapid tests, which is newfound from my perspective.
I am thankful for the opportunity to speak this evening, and I hope that I have laid out the reasons why rapid tests are important and the Liberal failure to bring forward rapid tests in a timely manner.
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Mr. Speaker, it never ceases to amaze me, no matter what we do on COVID, when it comes to the Conservatives, if it is something that the Liberals are putting forward, they are against it. They were against the measures to help businesses. They were against the measures to help individuals. They were against the mandates. They were against doing anything related to COVID whatsoever. Now, all of a sudden, it is like they found a new religion when it comes to the rapid tests, but it is not a new religion.
When I travelled back to my riding the last time from here, I had to get a box of rapid tests at the airport. For five days in a row I was doing tests. Nobody tracked it, but it enabled me to know that it was safe for me to be out in the community after those five days of testing.
I would ask the member this: What does he have against the measures that we have taken to help people through this pandemic?
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Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the member's story about rapid tests. It is too bad we did not have them two years ago. We could have managed COVID much better. That was kind of the entire thrust of my speech.
Rapid tests would have been an immense tool to help stop the entry of COVID into our country. I am frustrated. Here we are, at this late hour in the pandemic, and finally the Liberals have had their “come to Jesus” moment and are now willing to talk about rapid tests.
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