44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 14, 2022 11:00AM
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.
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Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise late this evening to speak to Bill C‑10.
I am pleased to stand today. I know the hour is late, but it still is Valentine's Day here in Ottawa. I think my husband at home is watching. I have never before stood in this place and been able to reference a husband. We have been married for less than three years, so I do want to say happy Valentine's Day to my sweetheart. I really love him a lot and I hope he will stick with me. It has not been long enough that I am really sure. No, I am sure.
I want to reflect on a very serious topic. As other members have mentioned tonight, it is hard to switch from love and romance to killer viruses, but I will. My middle name is Evans, for my great-grandmother, who died in the Spanish influenza outbreak about a hundred years ago. It left a mark on our family to this day. I was raised by a mother who was raised by a mother who lost her mother when she was three. It has an impact on a family, and I look at the Spanish flu outbreak and I think, it lasted two years and it killed somewhere between 25 million and 50 million on a planet which, at that time, had fewer than two billion people.
The planet has changed a lot. That outbreak managed to make its way around the world without the benefit, like right now, of the things modern society has done to increase the lethality and the longevity of viruses. We are now seven billion people and we have jet travel.
I want to look at this issue from the point of view of humanity separate from political parties, even separate from national identity. I want to look at it as humanity and an invisible parasite, and I want to say to my fellow human beings, be they Conservative, or Liberal, or Bloc, or NDP, Canadians, or New Zealanders, or Brits, there is an unhealthy degree of hubris at the moment on the part of humanity, whether someone is pro-vax or anti-mask or sure of themself in some way or another. We are too sure of ourselves. Humanity seems to think we are in charge, that we can debate in this place at what point we decree the pandemic is over. “No more masks; they are so annoying; we are so sick of it,” we say, worrying about the vaccines, saying they are not working so well anymore. Well, we can guess why they do not work so well anymore: the pandemic is operating with humanity as its petri dish.
I want to read something into the record. I do not usually do this, but this has educated me a lot about COVID. I read through the scientific papers, but this Canadian author and scientific writer, Andrew Nikiforuk, wrote a book in 2008 called Pandemonium, subtitled Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century. He wrote it in 2008. I want to quote from his most recent articles that appear in an online newspaper called The Tyee, starting with one from about a year ago, January 2021.
Andrew Nikiforuk titled his article “It's Me Again, COVID. Meet the Variant”. This is first-person writing from the point of view of the virus:
I explained then that I am the fire, and you are the fuel.
Many of your species believed that my presence couldn’t change everything....
Meantime, I’ve been evolving rapidly, as only the undead can do in a sea of endless hosts.
And your white coats are now expressing—what’s that splendid phrase?—“widespread concern” about my variants.
You didn’t notice the first one, D614G, which took off last March.
It became the dominant strain in the world because it did a better job, as your white coats put it, “infecting upper-airway epithelial cells, and [replicating] in greater numbers” than the Wuhan strain.
Natural selection just favours the bold.
And then came B117 in England in October.
Next arrived 501.V2 in South Africa in November.
Not to mention the mink variants in Denmark and the Netherlands. And that Brazilian variant, B1128, which just flew into Japan
There are others I daren’t even tell you about. So many opportunities. So much change.
This is nothing personal, of course. Mutating is what the undead do. The more human cells we hijack, the more opportunities we have to replicate. And every replication is a chance to mutate and play with the genome (my genetic bits) at a rate of one or two a month.
But when 10 or 20 mutations arise, well, it can transform my character and ambitions altogether, making it easier for my kind to kill, spread faster or better evade your immune defences. And right now, I am lethal enough to spread far. So, I am concentrating on spreading faster.
The scale of this you can’t comprehend. The more hosts we conquer and infect, the more mutations that occur.
And let me boast for a minute. Every thousandth of a litre of contagious fluid in a host’s nose harbours something like one hundred million to one billion viral replicators.
...The me that embarked from Wuhan on our great global journey is no longer the me riding ambulances in Ireland, Denmark and France.
Learn this: You will never meet the same virus twice.
...So let me give you hosts some humble advice. Party on. Don’t wash your hands. Gather in poorly ventilated places, and let me flourish and spread. Throw away those silly masks. Forget about public health and focus instead on the economy and the viral glories of global travel.
Praise politicians who go on holidays, debunk the exponential function, and design lockdowns with more holes than Swiss cheese.
Let your contact tracing systems fail. Let your leaders pretend that vaccines will solve all your problems.
Don't test. Or test badly.
Support a vaccine conspiracy.
Storm a capitol.
Or just don’t believe in me.
I know that’s not too much to ask. You have been a most generous and obliging host. Now just let my variants go.
Aren’t we all in this together?
Remember: I am the fire, and you are the fuel.
That is what Andrew Nikiforuk wrote in The Tyee a year ago, so I want to know if he is feeling a bit more relaxed now about where we are with omicron.
This article appeared in December 2021. It reads:
Omicron’s Here. We Invited It In
With good policy this massive fifth wave could have been avoided. Instead our leaders embraced four big myths.
The four big myths we chose to embrace, according to him, were these:
We find ourselves in this bad place because of the easy currency of bad ideas in a technological society.
These dangerous ideas—and I’m only going to deal with four—are worth reviewing again because if we don’t challenge and abandon them, we will be fighting COVID for years.
He goes on to discuss the work of a U.S. virus expert called Dr. William Haseltine, a renowned expert who had this article in Forbes on December 17, 2021, which I recommend my colleagues look up and read, “How Omicron Evades Natural Immunity, Vaccination, And Monoclonal Antibody Treatments”. He notes that Dr. Haseltine has made the point that the coronavirus has been around for a million years at least and can infect various animals, “The next variant might well come from an infected population of mink or deer.”
This is what I think we really need to think about when we think omicron is almost over and that it was really mild. Dr. Haseltine says this, and Andrew Nikiforuk quotes him:
...the seventh coronavirus to plague humans [which is COVID] “is capable of far more changes and far more variation than most ever thought possible and it will keep coming back to haunt us again and again.”
Dr. Haseltine points out that there is no assurance at all, not scientifically, that omicron is mild because we are in the direction of inevitably going to milder viruses.
I will quote the article by Andrew Nikiforuk, which states:
Hasletine adds that a variant more transmissible and [more] deadly than Omicron is entirely possible given the dismal global response to the pandemic so far.
Know that when I am talking about the global response I am not politicizing this at all. We need to take care of Bill C-10. For sure we need to look at testing, but we need to pay attention to what the human petri dish globally is doing.
Here are Andrew Nikiforuk's four myths:
Myth 1: Vaccines will get us out of this.
...A vaccine-only policy will prolong the pandemic and exhaust our health-care systems. Only nuanced policies that focus on eliminating transmission with the strategic use of testing, improved ventilation and restraints on international travel [are all needed].
Myth 2: Pandemics are unpredictable and have nothing to do with policy or human behaviour.
Not true. Our global technosphere has provided a perfect environment for COVID to flourish. Two human behaviours in a technological society have fed and accelerated this pandemic. The first is unrestricted global travel, which guarantees the circulation of variants. The second is poor ventilation in our artificial living and working spaces....
I heard myth three today in the House in debate, so I really want to underscore that this is dangerous talk. I go back to Andrew Nikiforuk's article:
Myth 3: We can live with this virus, and it will become milder over time.
Really? How’s that working for you?
...[Getting rid of the virus] matters for several key reasons. For starters there is no guarantee any new virus will evolve toward a milder state. It is a complete scientific myth.
Let me repeat Haseltine’s pointed warning that we have not seen the [worst] COVID can deliver yet.
At the same time the cost of “living with the virus” is growing exponentially. The variants keep adding to those political, economic and psychological costs by increasing transmission, severity and lethality of COVID-19.
More variants equals more mutations which equals more risk for all of us. And the variants are now clearly outracing the vaccines....
Myth 4 is a really dangerous one. The article continues:
Myth 4: COVID is just a flu-like virus.
Just because a novel coronavirus may provoke flu-like symptoms doesn’t make it a flu. Or even a close relative....
As many physicians have argued, it is best to think of this novel virus as an evolving thrombotic fever.
It attacks the vascular system and can destroy brain cells.
It inflames the heart and can destabilize immune systems.
It can even lower sperm counts and motility.
Even people with mild symptoms can suffer from chronic disabilities (fatigue and brain fog) a year after infection. To date we have no clear idea how an infection might undo a person’s health a decade from now.
Please take this final line to heart, my friends:
Any politician who still dismisses or compares COVID to a flu should be forced to clean and bathe the dead.
We have choices as Canadians. We have choices as elected people. We have choices as governments and as opposition. We can focus on what needs to be done to keep us all safe. We can decide that the hubris that tells a virus it is time for it to go is laughable. In fact, sometimes I think the virus is laughing at us.
We have to be careful with each other. That includes not demonizing others, whether they are anti-mask or anti-vaccine or pro-mask or pro-vaccine. We are all in this together. It is an example of how humanity and wealthy industrialized countries can be brought to their knees from something invisible that comes out of nature and decides we are the host or, as Nikiforuk says, it is the fire and we are the fuel.
We have to do some things rapidly. We need to do a much better job. Thank goodness we are getting rapid testing through Bill C-10, but we have to use those tests. We have to use them well. We have to recognize that vaccines are not the whole answer; they are part of the answer. Testing is not the whole answer; it is part of the answer. Being sure we keep to social distancing, being sure we keep to our masks and being sure we listen to public health advice are all things we must do.
Again, this is a tough one because everyone wants the restrictions on global travel to be lifted. However, when I read what a knowledgeable person like Andrew Nikiforuk says about the difference that air and jet travel have made in the spread of this virus, we have to be careful. We have to listen to public health advice and make sure we do not give COVID any more free rides.
This is the enemy. The enemy is not another political party. The enemy is not a provincial leader who does not get it right. As Canadians and, let us face it, as earthlings, we have two big enemies right now, two big threats. We have the climate crisis, which is getting pushed to the side during this debate over viruses, over convoys and over protests. The climate crisis is a bigger threat to humanity than the virus, but the longer the virus is allowed to live among us, the scary idea that we can live with it is a dreadful fallacy.
We need to work together and we need to protect each other. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. There is no one in this place that I would not trust with my life. If push came to shove, there is not another MP here who would deny me help if I went to them and said I needed help. We are here for each other at a very human level.
Right now, humanity is not in the driver's seat. This virus is in the driver's seat. I wish we could say, “Here is the timetable and here is the date.” The only reason I could not vote for the Conservative motion earlier today was that it said there was a certain date when everything would have to be lifted, and here I am thinking that we are not in the driver's seat. We do not know when the next variant might come, but the more we learn about this and the more we know about it, the more we know we have to be careful and protect each other, and make sure we do not encourage the virus to spread.
It now represents a serious threat to the world and to us as human beings. We are all in the same boat. That reality is quite clear.
We have to take care of each other, and I think that means we have to recognize that we have only one enemy stalking us and its name is COVID-19. It is not the Conservatives, it is not the Liberals, it is not the New Democrats, it is not the Bloc Québécois and it is not the Greens. We are in this together.
I beg of you to let us pass Bill C-10 and get the tests out so we can use that tool. Let us not make the mistake of thinking that will be enough, as we do not know how long this may last. Please God, let us make better choices than we have made so far, and I include all of us in that, in order to protect ourselves, our families and the developing world, which desperately needs the vaccines. We desperately need to ensure vaccine equity and for Canada to side with South Africa and India. Let us get rid of the patent protections under the TRIPS agreement of the WTO. These are things we can do to make sure this virus, which is circling the globe and treating humanity as its petri dish, is stopped. Let us put humans together, saving each other, and stop fighting among ourselves.
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