44th Parl. 1st Sess.

June 3, 2024 11:00AM

Mr. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith (Beaches—East York, Lib.)

Jun/3/24 11:53:04 a.m.
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moved that the bill be read the third time and passed. He said: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the support to get the bill through report stage. I am confident we will be sending the bill to the Senate. It is very important that we do so and that the bill becomes law. We have lived through a pandemic that no one wants to live through again, and it is important we put measures in place here today, as parliamentarians, to ensure accountability not just in the current Parliament but also in future Parliaments. What do I mean by accountability? I mean that all future governments would have to table a plan in the House to ensure that they are as prepared as possible for the next pandemic and that they take efforts to reduce risks to prevent the next pandemic. We can remember SARS. What happened after SARS? There were reports, studies and recommendations, and some of the recommendations were even adopted, but not all of them. Politicians forgot. Politicians were not studying the reports or calling for renewed action in the wake of the reports, and it fell away. Were we as prepared as we should have been for the pandemic? Were provinces as prepared as they should have been? Was the federal government as prepared as it should have been? Absolutely not. No one wants to relive what we lived through, but let us remember what we went through, because if we do not remember, we are destined to live through something very similar. If we remember, we will remember the army having to go into nursing homes. We will remember the fear of the unknown that we all experienced. We will remember the great scale of loss. The pandemic required a wartime effort across levels of government and across parties to do what we needed to do to save lives. The pandemic upended so many lives. There were not just lives lost; it also upended employment. It upended relationships. It made it so hard for so many. Before I get into the second piece, I want to speak to what the bill would do. Some people have said we could have a plan already, that the bill would be overreaching and get into provincial jurisdiction. What would the plan do? It would do one thing, very simply. It would require the government to table, in Parliament, a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan to ensure that the government and the health minister take a whole-of-government approach and work with ministers across government to turn their minds to how they would take steps to reduce pandemic risk and prepare the current government and future governments for the next pandemic. I was not going to get into the missteps along the way. I can criticize the way the wage subsidy rolled out. I can criticize different public health measures. I was furious, as the father of kids who are now seven and four years old, when Ontario closed its schools for the final time in a January during the pandemic. However, we should consider the alternative. I know not everyone loves the Prime Minister today, but the Prime Minister stood outside his home on a daily basis and acted like a prime minister. He delivered benefits, putting politics aside, and worked with opposition parties and other levels of government to support businesses and individuals in a time of crisis. Let us consider the counterfactual, such as if the Leader of the Opposition were the prime minister during a crisis like the one we just had. When faced with questions about the special budgetary measures that were being put in place, everyone else was putting politics aside, but not the leader of the official opposition, the member for Carleton. He said we did not need big, fat government programs. He said we needed to lower taxes and eliminate regulatory red tape. It is as if we pull a string and the doll says the same thing again and again, even in a crisis. Every other party at every other level of government was willing to work across party lines to save lives and support individuals and businesses through the crisis. Let us imagine if the Leader of the Opposition had been the prime minister at the time and had said, yes, people who own small businesses are having their lives upended and yes, they are losing employment because they cannot go into work because of the pandemic and crisis, but that we are going to lower taxes and cut red tape. Does anyone in the House think that is a serious answer? Absolutely not. The Prime Minister was acting like a prime minister. Let us forget about supporting the special measures; we know the counterfactual, that a Conservative prime minister would not have supported special measures. What about public health measures? Conservatives at the time were saying two things. They were saying that vaccines were not going to rollout fast enough; they did. Conservatives then undermined public confidence in immunization. Of course, there is a credible debate to be had about certain public health measures, and we can have that credible debate. We could have had a credible debate at the time, but there should not have been an instance where the local health officers of the regions of the member for Sarnia—Lambton, the member for Haldimand—Norfolk or the member for Niagara West, whether it was the head of Norfolk County's EMS or the public health officer in Sarnia—Lambton, had to issue public statements correcting the record to say that we should defend public health efforts and that people should ignore the comments from one's elected officials and not listen to them. Yes, we can have a credible debate, but we cannot afford to undermine public confidence in immunization. What happens if we do? We see what is happening. In Ontario, there has just been the first death in years from measles. Why did it happen? It is because vaccination rates have plummeted. That is a direct consequence of the willingness to undermine public health efforts and undermine immunization. Again, debate is warranted and individuals can protest as they like. I, as some people in the House may know, criticized the invocation of the Emergencies Act. What I did not do, though, was bring donuts and coffee and celebrate lawlessness. That is not the conduct we should expect from a prime minister. That is not something we should expect from someone who should be acting as a statesman in a crisis. It is actually the opposite of what we should expect from our leaders. Just imagine if the leader of the official opposition had been the prime minister. I do not say Erin O'Toole, as I think he would have managed through the crisis just fine. He is a serious person. The individual who occupies the current chair of leader of the official opposition is unserious and would have managed us through the crisis in the most unserious way. I want to close with this, because I have heard some members ask about agriculture. One should know what is in the bill, which says that we have got to make efforts to address antimicrobial resistance. We should. Farmers are doing that. Agriculture is doing that. The bill says that we should regulate activities to address pandemic risk. Conservatives trip over themselves to talk about biosecurity if it means ending whistleblowing on farms, but they do not want to talk about biosecurity when it means reducing pandemic risk, because that is all it is. In fact, farming operations already take pandemic risk incredibly seriously here in Canada, but not all around the world. We see pandemics driven by spillover risks associated with animals. What is a “one health” approach? All it does is recognize and address the fact that animal health, human health and environmental health are interconnected. I am going to quote the member from Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke. I could not believe it. With respect to promoting alternative proteins, there is a huge pulse industry in Canada. It is a good thing to promote alternative proteins. Instead, the member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke says, “alternative protein is...a far-left dog whistle [for eating] crickets”. I put that to the representative from Soy Canada. He did not really know what to say at committee. Again, the Conservatives are completely unserious. If we want to make efforts to prepare for the next pandemic or to reduce the risk of the next pandemic, we need the act in place, and we should also be very wary about electing certain Conservatives.

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