House Hansard - 75

44th Parl. 1st Sess.

May 19, 2022 10:00AM

Mr. Yasir Naqvi (Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Lib.)

May/19/22 3:37:34 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, that is a tall order to follow. Before I get into talking about the motion at hand, I want to take a moment to thank the member for Mississauga—Lakeshore for his service in this place. I am confident that his community is better for it, and definitely our country is better for it. It took me down memory lane when he was talking about immigrating from Germany and his parents telling him and his siblings that they were coming to Canada. I had a similar experience when my family and I were immigrating to Canada. My parents came in one day and said that we were moving to Canada. As I was a teenager at the time, that was obviously big, life-changing news. We probably did not understand the full impact of it, but it was one of the best decisions that my parents made for my siblings and me. Living in this great country definitely changed our lives. I want to come back to this motion and speak about it. I think it is an important conversation that we are having in the House around the impact of the pandemic that we all have faced in our lives. Now that we are getting, hopefully, to the tail end of the pandemic, there are questions around how we get back to resuming our lives. As for all of the different functions that the government performs and that we had done before the pandemic, how do we get them to a normal place, as they were before? I think it is important to note, and it is important to remind all of us, that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic. I often hear debate in the House and it sometimes feels as if we have forgotten that the pandemic is not yet over. We still do not have complete control over this disease. This virus has taken countless innocent lives from us, not only here in Canada but around the world. I believe that the number is about a million or so. I may be understating it, but it is a large number. We are still in the midst of this global pandemic, so we have to be mindful about that particular important fact and be able to work together, not only as parliamentarians but also as members of the society of citizens of Canada, to put an end to this pandemic. That is why our government here in Canada, federally, and the provincial and territorial governments, in line with global governments around the world, took the important steps they took over two years ago to control the spread of this highly transmissible disease: the coronavirus. As a result, we all recall, our entire system got shut down. It had to be done overnight. Nobody did that because that was what they wanted to do. Nobody did that because it was part of some grand conspiracy, which some people out there believe but is absolutely false. It was done so that we could protect lives. Members can just imagine for a moment if those important steps had not been taken to shut down our airports, to limit travel and to make sure we worked from home as opposed to going into large, congregating settings. Members can imagine how many more lives would have been lost. All of those steps, and all of those precautions, were taken on the advice of public health officials so that we could protect each other. There is nothing more valuable, as we know, than human life. That is why we all took those steps. Thanks to our scientists here in Canada and around the world, and how quickly they worked to develop a vaccine that could then help us immunize ourselves from COVID-19, which is another remarkable achievement, a vaccine was created in a very short period of time. It got tested. It was proved that it actually saves lives. There was a massive effort here in Canada, which is ongoing around the world, to vaccinate ourselves so that we could fight this virus as well. Can members imagine if that had not happened? How many lives have been saved because Canadians really stepped up and got vaccinated with both shots? The number for the booster shots is continually rising. Hopefully, more Canadians will get their third shot, as I have, and I am sure many members of the House have. That is being done so we can protect lives. The question now is what do we do next? Perhaps that is the essence of this motion we are debating today as we are hopefully at the tail end of this pandemic. We have to continue to listen to the advice of public health experts, who are telling us that we cannot rush to lift the mandates when it comes to requiring people to get vaccinated, to wear masks or to make sure they keep a proper distance.

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House Hansard - 75