SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 68

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 10, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 68 - May/10/22
Ms. Melissa Lantsman (Thornhill, CPC)
  • May/10/22 2:43:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, 50,000 fans watched the Jays play live, with no masks and no mandates. Over 20,000, with standing room only, will see the Leafs in the playoffs, with no masks and no mandates. Thank goodness the government is not in charge of sports. The secret public health advice that it is getting seems exclusively focused on punishing Canadians who want to fly to see their families or get back to work. I will ask this again: Which day will the government end the vindictive mandates?
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Context: House Hansard - 68 - May/10/22
Mr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC)
  • May/10/22 7:07:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise this evening to take the opportunity, on behalf of Canadians who are wondering, to ask the government when it will end the mandates. I have asked this question a few times in here, and I knew that my remarks this evening would draw a big crowd in the government benches, and rightly so. There should be a lot of attention on this from government members and from backbenchers of the governing party, because we are two years into this pandemic and we know an awful lot more about COVID now than we did in March 2020. What we are looking for from the government is the same thing that we have been calling for, which we have formalized in motions in this place: the benchmarks that need to be hit for federal COVID mandates to be lifted. This was an entirely reasonable position for us to take several months ago. However, the government has failed to provide them, so now our position is for the government to catch up to the science and end the mandates. The opportunity to furnish Canadians with the information that the government is using to keep the mandates in place has come and gone. Now the government needs to catch up. It needs to catch up with the chief medical officers of health in the provinces across the country, who have put in place plans and lifted mandates. It needs to catch up with our allies, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and the list goes on. Some of the mandates that we have in place here were never put in place elsewhere, but they remain in place. They are extremely restrictive and include domestic requirements for taking flights and trains in this country and for continuing work in a federally regulated job or in the public service. The vaccine mandates that the government put in place, as we have heard from the minister on more than one occasion, have served their purpose. They drove vaccine rates up. If that was the raison d'être and it has been successful, then let us hang up the “mission accomplished” banner and end the mandates. This is what we have been looking for. What are the epidemiological factors that the government has been relying on to keep the mandates in place? Are they based on waste-water surveillance? Are they based on vaccination rates? Are they based on regional or provincial case counts? We do not know and when we have asked, the government does not seem to know. We have even heard from the top doctor at the Public Health Agency of Canada that it is not her decision when to lift the mandates. I therefore have a couple of questions, and I expect that my hon. friend, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, is going to offer a response. My questions are as follows. Whose decision is it to lift the mandates? What are the benchmarks that are being evaluated for them to arrive at their decision to end the mandates? On what day or date does he reasonably expect that the mandates will be lifted? Canadians deserve to know.
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