Hon. Jean-Yves Duclos, P.C., M.P., Minister of Health: People often ask me what politics is like. I tell them that politics is the art of working together even when you don’t always agree. That is exactly what has been going on in Canada over the past 22 months.

People have different points of view. Elections sometimes bring out a variety of opinions. We had a big debate during the last election campaign about vaccine mandates, and Canadians decided they wanted them.

As I said, this has produced amazing results. Three million Canadians made the decision to protect themselves because of the federal, provincial and territorial vaccine mandates. These Canadians were also protecting their loved ones and protecting our economy from lockdowns. What this means is that Canada is still doing fairly well, even with a variant like Omicron. If we’d experienced the Omicron variant in April 2020, without any vaccines or vaccine mandates, there probably would have been tens of thousands more deaths. I can’t imagine what it would have been like for our hospitals. It would have had a disastrous economic and fiscal impact.

We are in the position we’re in today because we made good individual decisions and because, during the last election, Canadians decided to do the right thing and encourage people to protect themselves and get vaccinated.

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