44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 24, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that members have come in to listen to me getting wound up over an important issue.
We got a lot of resistance when we started talking about the behaviour of some of the Conservatives. I truly believe that there some who recognize the importance of public health and see the value of vaccinations, but a good portion do not, and this is from the leader down. The person who really gave birth to this legislation was the leader of the Conservative Party.
Some hon. members: Hear, hear!
Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: Mr. Speaker, not all of them are clapping, we will notice, because they recognize the irresponsible behaviour and the reckless attitude the Conservative leader has taken on this legislation.
He has passed it on to another member, but the fact still remains that, as a health issue, we have seen other jurisdictions of different political parties recognize that vaccinations do in fact work. They care about the environment that people work in and want safe working environments. When people board an aircraft or a tube in the sky, air ventilation is important. These are the types of things about which we should all be concerned.
The only ones who seem not to care are in the official opposition, the Conservatives. I do not know if they have mustered any other support, but I do not think they have. I do not think there is another political entity in the House of Commons that is against vaccines, let alone within provincial governments, especially since provincial governments put in things such as curfews, mandatory masking and wanting to get vaccines to the public. Many of them took the initiative of providing proof of vaccination. They should take a flip-flop on this issue.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-278, the prevention of government-imposed vaccination mandates act. To begin, I believe it is important to note that the discussion surrounding this legislation has been highly politicized and riddled with misinformation from the day it was first introduced by the member for Carleton during the Conservative leadership race.
At that time, the bill was promoted by the member as a means to “scrap all vaccine mandates and ban any and all future vaccine mandates”. This is, of course, simply not accurate. The text of the legislation before the House now only references a single disease, which is COVID-19.
Indeed, Bill C-278 would legislatively restrict the federal government's future ability to set COVID-19 vaccine requirements, regardless of the future trajectory of the virus or the development of new vaccines. If a future variant turned out to be extraordinarily deadly and a vaccine was developed that could stop its transmission, this legislation would legally prohibit the government from imposing any kind of requirement to have that vaccine, even if the health of millions of Canadians was put at risk.
The member for Carleton has also incorrectly described to the House the current status of the mandates. The COVID-19 vaccination requirement for federal public servants was lifted on June 20, 2022. Employees who were placed on administrative leave without pay for non-compliance with that policy in force were contacted by their managers to arrange their return to regular work duties.
As of June 20, 2022, the vaccine requirement to board a plane or train in Canada was also suspended. In addition, federally regulated transport sector employers were no longer required to have mandatory vaccination policies in place for their employees. Finally, effective October 1, 2022, the federal government removed proof of COVID-19 vaccination requirements for anyone entering Canada.
With the record a bit corrected, I would like to proceed with what New Democrats believe. We support an approach to vaccination policy that appropriately balances the rights of people who have not been vaccinated and who choose not to be vaccinated with our individual and collective rights to health and safety. We believe that decisions with respect to imposing or suspending vaccination requirements should always be based on the best available evidence, current science and the advice of experts, not politicians speaking from the House of Commons with little or no background in any of those things.
The Conservatives cannot argue that it was wrong for the Liberal government to politicize Canada's COVID-19 response, which I think they did, while simultaneously asking politicians to legislate our country's vaccination policy indefinitely into the future without any evidence.
If the Conservatives sincerely wanted to take an evidence-based approach to COVID-19 policy, then they would have supported an independent inquiry into Canada's pandemic response when they had the opportunity to do so. However, shockingly, when the NDP moved an amendment at the Standing Committee on Health yesterday to legally mandate that a COVID-19 inquiry, under the Inquiries Act, be struck within 90 days, the Conservatives sat on their hands and abstained, allowing the Liberals to kill that inquiry.
I can see why the Liberals might be reluctant to call an inquiry into their own COVID-19 response, but this reversal from the cover-up Conservatives is truly shocking to see. Under the leadership of their previous leader, Erin O'Toole, the Conservative Party repeatedly called for an independent, expert-led inquiry into Canada's COVID-19 response. The Conservative Party pledged to call such an inquiry during the last election. We will need to leave it to the current Leader of the Opposition to explain this departure from his predecessor's position and the party's public pronouncements.
I believe it is unacceptable that the Liberals and Conservatives joined and worked together yesterday to block an independent review of Canada's response to the most severe pandemic in a century, because serious issues remain unexamined. Some of them include the following. We started the pandemic with not enough personal protective equipment: not enough gloves, masks, gowns and respirators. We had no proper national inventory of the personal protective equipment.
Canadians may remember that we had to throw out millions of pieces of PPE because they were expired. We saw no vaccine production in Canada, a shocking omission that has stretched over Liberal and Conservative governments for decades, who watched as Canada's ability and capacity in this regard was left to wither and die.
There was little to no public guidance on infection-acquired immunity. There was a curious dismantling of Canada's early pandemic warning systems. Canadians had no access to whole vaccines, only MRNA vaccines. There was confusing and contradictory information on the impact of vaccination on transmission. The impact and effectiveness of mandates remains a question.
Border controls were inconsistently enforced. Effectively, border controls in Quebec and Alberta were virtually absent. There were ravages through seniors' homes, overwhelmed emergency rooms and ICUs, and uncertainty about the efficacy of vaccines on mutating variants.
Now, instead of papering over previous mistakes or relying on pseudo-science to set public health policy, we must leave no stone unturned to learn from the past and prepare for future threats. Many prominent public health and security experts have called for the federal government to launch an expert-led independent inquiry into Canada's COVID-19 response.
The NDP has proposed an inquiry under the Inquiries Act, because such an inquiry would be independent. It would be led by an impartial person, notably a judge. It would be properly resourced with counsel. It would have the power to subpoena documents and compel the attendance of witnesses. It would be conducted in public. At the end of the day, it should do a searching root-to-branch comprehensive analysis of every issue that Canadians have raised during the pandemic response by the federal government.
Again, the Conservatives had a chance to make that happen, because the NDP and the Bloc were voting in favour of this motion, but they said no. They abstained. Instead, the Conservatives want to legislate science from the floor of the House of Commons. That is irresponsible.
Prominent Canadians, such as David Naylor, co-chair of the federal COVID-19 immunity task force, and the former chair of the federal review of the 2003 SARS epidemic, thinks there should be an independent public inquiry. So does Richard Fadden, former national security adviser to Stephen Harper. Recently, the British Medical Journal, one of the world's oldest general medical journals, published a series that examined Canada's COVID-19 response and called for an independent national inquiry.
Why do the Conservatives not want one? Again, they would rather play politics. The New Democrats do not and will not allow the Conservative Party or the Liberals to play politics with Canadians' health.
The British Medical Journal documented a number of deeply troubling pandemic failures in Canada, including that Canada's emergency response was impaired by long-standing weaknesses in the public health and health care systems. These included fragmented health leadership across federal, provincial and territorial governments. They noted that pandemic performance varied widely across Canada's provinces and territories, hampered by inconsistency in decision-making, inadequate data, infrastructure and misalignment of priorities.
They noted that lacking an independent federal inquiry allows others to step into the frame. We have seen the so-called National Citizens Inquiry, led by Preston Manning, for example, which appears to be fuelled by vaccine safety misinformation and ideological concerns with government public health measures. This is far from the full, national and public inquiry led by independent experts that Canada's pandemic performance deserves.
An inquiry would help deliver on Canada's ambition to be a global leader, and most importantly, it would deliver answers to Canadians, whose confidence has been shaken. At the end of the day, a public inquiry is needed to restore the Canadian population's confidence, to ensure accountability for decisions that have been made and, most importantly, to find out what went well and what did not. Thus, we could better prepare for the next pandemic, as experts tell us that it is not a question of if, but when.
While the Leader of the Opposition pontificates, pretends and politicizes this very important public health issue on the floor of the House of Commons, New Democrats are pushing for what Canadians really want. That is a full, independent, public, impartial, searching and comprehensive public inquiry.
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Mr. Speaker, this is the first time I rise to speak since you were elected Speaker. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you and wish you a long reign.
I want to begin by saying that the Bloc Québécois, the adult in the room, is opposed to Bill C-278. The summary of this bill reads as follows:
This enactment amends the Financial Administration Act to provide that the Treasury Board may not require as a condition of employment in the federal public administration that a person receive a vaccine against COVID-19. It also amends the Canada Labour Code to provide that regulations may not be made that require, as a term or condition of employment in or in connection with the operation of a federal work, undertaking or business, that a person receive a vaccine against COVID-19.
In addition, the enactment amends the Aeronautics Act, the Railway Safety Act and the Canada Shipping Act, 2001 to provide that no regulation, order or other instrument made under any of those Acts to prevent the introduction or spread of COVID-19 may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting a person from boarding an aircraft, a train or a vessel solely on the ground that they have not received a vaccine against that disease.
What can I say about this bill? First, we will begin with a short step back in time. Back in the day, Bill C‑285 required reasonable accommodation for people who refused to get vaccinated and wanted to use various means of transportation like trains, planes or ships. It also prohibited employers from retaliating against people's health decisions. The bill stated that a person who lost their job for refusing treatments such as a vaccine could not be denied employment insurance. This was understood to be the COVID‑19 vaccine.
Bill C‑278 essentially does the same thing, but this time it prohibits restrictions related to vaccination status specifically for COVID-19. Bill C‑285, on the other hand, targeted all types of medical treatment. What disturbs us about this bill are the reasons that led to it. Still, I would rather speak to the House about the reasons why we think it makes no sense.
We consider that the restrictions, such as the vaccine mandate for international travel, were justified. They were temporary and necessary in the context of COVID‑19. Although some measures seemed unreasonable, for example, the vaccine mandate for all federal public servants, even those who do not come in contact with the public, these measures were up for debate during the 2021 election campaign and were upheld by the courts.
The Bloc Québécois also refuses to buy the conspiracy theories the member for Niagara West is selling. The many statements this member has previously made on vaccines, as well as the nature of the petitions he has sponsored, make it difficult to see his initiative and this bill as anything other than the umpteenth attempt to discredit vaccines. This is what we are talking about when we talk about the reasons that motivated the member to bring in this bill.
Let us not forget that the restrictions specific to COVID-19 and the borders have all been lifted since October 1, 2022. As for the vaccine mandate for federal employees, it was dropped on June 20, 2022. What is more, this bill seems to be aligned with several anti-vax petitions that contained many false statements based on dubious sources. Nevertheless, the member sponsored these petitions.
The Bloc Québécois will not be fooled. It knows that the bill's intention is to curry favour with the base of the member's party by spreading misinformation. COVID‑19 was not a conspiracy; it was a tragedy. The different waves of COVID‑19 in Quebec and Canada cost close to 18,000 lives back home in Quebec, over 50,000 in Canada and close to 6.5 million worldwide. This is no dream; it is reality. However, we see here that the Conservatives' sympathies do not lie with the victims, the health workers or all our young people who made sacrifices to protect our seniors. Neither do its sympathies lie with my friend Annie, an immunocompromised kidney transplant patient who risks death simply by getting COVID‑19. The Conservatives' sympathies lie with pandemic deniers.
The Conservatives have chosen to forget all of that by voting against the principle of Bill S‑209, which calls for the designation of March 11 as pandemic observance day.
Not only do they not wish to acknowledge the tragedy, they are now proposing that we deny that vaccines saved many lives and enabled us to emerge from the pandemic. They can be the ones to tell those who lost a family member to COVID-19, those who were separated from their loved ones for a long time, or those who suffer from long COVID and are still affected by the virus, that this pandemic is nothing but a conspiracy, a hoax. They can be the ones to ask the guardian angels who have propped up our hospital system all this time whether COVID-19 is a sham, an invention.
Misinformation is a growing problem in our society, and it is very alarming. Misinformation has become an illness amongst the Conservatives. We need only look at the falsehoods they are spreading about the carbon tax, pretending that it applies to Quebec because it suits them to say it does.
It is preposterous to claim to be the party that will form the next government by spreading falsehoods. We can argue about a lot of things, and people can be more right leaning or left leaning. The Conservatives can even shamelessly criticize the current government's decisions on the pretext that it is too left-wing. However, they cannot lie to people just to gain power, although that is exactly what the Conservative Party is determined to do. It is unfortunate for democracy, for the people, and for the trust and honesty that we must honour in this place.
I invite the Conservative Party to reconsider the methods it uses to gain power. People are not naive. The shift towards lies and misinformation is dangerous. Fortunately, the Bloc Québécois is elevating the debate and bringing some lucidity and maturity to the conversation. The Bloc Québécois is responsible and will vote against this bill because, from the beginning, the Bloc has always supported bills that make sense and opposed those that do not.
By refusing to recognize the value of COVID‑19 vaccines, the Conservatives are once again denying science. If this bill passed, our entire society could someday have to sacrifice its very safety and security to the anti-vax beliefs of a small group of people who are still in denial. That would be completely unacceptable. We have to ask ourselves if individual freedom ends where collective freedom begins.
The Conservative Party needs to go redo its homework, because I am sure that the people who supported it up until now will be put off when they see the party's true colours. It is a party of lies that need to be debunked right now.
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Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to see that the Conservatives have decided to take a break from denial of climate change and go back to an old debate, denial of vaccine effectiveness. Vaccines save lives, right off the top. It is not something I have heard today from the other side. This is the priority today of the Conservative Party. It is the priority of its leader to deny vaccines.
There was no mention, not that I heard, that more than 54,000 Canadians have died of COVID-19. That is more than the number of Canadians who died in the Second World War. Some 751 Niagara residents died of COVID-19, and in the past month, there have been six in intensive care in Niagara. They could be constituents of mine or of the member for Niagara West, who is sponsoring this bill on behalf of the Leader of the Opposition.
Vaccine denial is not a new thing. Vaccine denial is as old as vaccines. It goes back to the 19th century, when the first vaccines against smallpox came around. Funnily enough, at that time in the 19th century, vaccine denial was led by people who were selling snake oil and trying to make money on the side with their snake oil remedies to combat smallpox, which did not have any effectiveness. We see the grift continue here, but it is disappointing to watch the official opposition dive in head first again and again. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and unfortunately, when dealing with a massive health crisis, there are those in His Majesty's loyal opposition who echoed the disinformation and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
I would like to go back a bit. I wish it was not more than 20 years ago, but when I was in my early twenties, I got a job in the labour pool at a paper mill in the Niagara region. I got through the interview and there was a requirement that I show proof of vaccination for tetanus. I had not had the vaccine within the past 10 years, so I had to get it before I could start work at the paper mill.
Every doctor, nurse, soldier, firefighter, pilot or police officer whom any Canadian has ever met in their lives has had a vaccine and had to have a vaccine before they started work. What is the reason for this? The Conservatives talk about having to protect our soldiers, having to do this and having to do that. Through world wars we have required soldiers to get vaccines because it protects their health and that of the person next to them in the trenches or foxholes. However, Conservatives do not care, and it is truly unfortunate that they are trying to take us back to square one.
Vaccines, as I mentioned, are safe, and it is alarming that we have not heard that from the official opposition. All its speakers gloss over that. They gloss over the effectiveness. If our ancestors saw that, it would be unbelievable to them that we would give away this miraculous medical breakthrough on all the diseases that have killed so many people through the years, including COVID-19.
One of the most horrific stories that I heard during the pandemic, and heard it time and again, was about nurses. Do members remember when they were our health care heroes? Well, that has faded, unfortunately, for the Conservatives and the Leader of the Opposition. They had to sit there and watch people die, people who listened to the misinformation and disinformation. People were begging on their deathbeds for a vaccine from nurses and doctors, only to be told they would have had to get it before they got sick and could not get it at the last moment.
Again, there was deafening silence from the Conservatives on that. I am not sure who they are trying to rally to. Actually, we do know who they are trying to rally to. They closed down this city for a few weeks. They closed down international borders. They tried to grind the economy to a halt.
The Conservatives talk a good game, although usually only during question period, about vulnerable Canadians. They talk a good game of wanting to stand to protect vulnerable Canadians. In this case, vaccines do that. I may be lucky, and most of us here may be healthy enough that, if we contracted COVID–19 and the disease progressed to a point, maybe we would be okay, but maybe not.
What about small children? What about seniors? What about people with severe illnesses? I hope members never have to witness a baby with whooping cough, for example, who did not get a vaccine. It takes a second. I can understand some people being concerned about it because it is a needle in their arm, but they should speak to their physicians about it because they know best about their patients' health.
My doctors told me to get it as soon as it was available. That is how much confidence they had. I know my doctors are good doctors. The doctors throughout the Niagara region, and throughout Canada, are highly regulated. These are people who are here to protect our health and would tell us to get the available vaccinations immediately.
Through the course of human history, disease has ravaged us so much that perhaps we are benefiting from its success if we can say in 2023 that we do not need these vaccines or to worry about things such as polio, smallpox or measles. I am sure many members of the House had measles when they were a kid and think it was okay, but kids die of measles. There was a kid in New York State who contracted polio in 2023. Mercifully, there was no outbreak, but there could have been. As more politicians like those in the Conservative Party try to make political hay out of vaccines and vaccine mandates, there is an acceptance that these snake oil sales people are trying to make us less healthy, which is truly disappointing.
I want to thank the vast majority of Canadians who did their part. Canadians stood up to protect their neighbours, families, loved ones and co-workers. They knew it was the right thing to do. It is shameful that the Conservatives would stand up to cheer on those who would stand against that, but there is no willingness on their part to stand up for the most vulnerable. They talk a good game during question period, I will grant them that, but after those 45 minutes are done, and sometimes it is a little longer, we do not see any of that. Their disregard for public health is absolutely shocking.
For more than 150 years, vaccines have been a valid public health tool, and in a crisis such as COVID–19, something we had not seen in our lifetime, it was a valid public tool to use. To take it off the table just shows the Conservatives' denial for science, for what is best for the Canadian people and for the protection of vulnerable members of society. In another pandemic, we would not want that party in charge. It is just not worth the risk.
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