Debates of Nov. 2nd, 2009

Employment Insurance Act

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

It being 6:30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded divisions on the motions at report stage of Bill C-50.

Call in the members.

And the bells having rung:

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

The question is on Motion No. 1. A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 2 and 3.

(The House divided on Motion No. 1, which was agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #121

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I declare Motion No. 1 carried. I therefore declare Motions Nos. 2 and 3 carried.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

moved that the bill, as amended, be concurred in.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

In my opinion the yeas have it.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

And five or more members having risen:

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #122

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I declare the motion carried.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

The House will now proceed to the consideration of a motion to adjourn the House for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter requiring urgent consideration, namely the supply of H1N1 vaccines.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

moved:

That this House do now adjourn.

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore, and I want to thank all of the Speakers for granting this important debate.

This past weekend I was inundated with calls and emails from MPs, asking questions and describing the situation on the ground in their ridings. I think it is important that tonight we get to tell those stories and call on the government to respond to this crisis.

Peter Newman has said that politics in Canada is the art of making the necessary possible. Determining what is necessary and fighting for it is political. In public health there is a role for politicians of all political stripes to fight for the necessary resources to protect the health and safety of Canadians, and ensure that the priorities of the government of the day are in line with the needs of Canadians. This is not partisan, but it is political.

When the minister stated that there was no pandemic plan before the Conservative government took office, that is partisan. Canada has had a pandemic preparedness plan since 1988. In 2003 we learned the lessons of SARS, and quickly put in place a response to David Naylor's report: collaboration, cooperation, communication and clarity of who does what, when. We put in place the Public Health Agency of Canada, appointed Dr. David Butler-Jones as the first Chief Public Health Officer for Canada, and established the public health network for Canada where all 13 jurisdictions would be able to plan together with the federal government for the public health of all Canadians.

Canada's pandemic plan was one of the best in the world. The plan ensured a supply of vaccines for all Canadians and adequate stockpiles of Tamiflu. These were good planning decisions. Our criticism is not with the plan, but with the failure to adapt the plan quickly to respond to this new, novel virus, and the execution of the response to the pandemic itself.

In the 2004 budget we put in place a trust fund of $100 million for the provinces to build the capacity for front line public health. In 2007 the Conservative government cancelled that fund. The 2006 budget booked $400 million for pandemic response. We now find out that the government put the reserve fund into five annual packages of $80 million, and each year without a pandemic, the money has disappeared.

The Minister of Health has continued to state that she is working with the provinces and territories, yet she unilaterally decided that the provinces and territories would pay for 40% of the costs of the vaccine and for all of the costs of the administration of the vaccination program.

The provinces and territories have been asking for help. The government has refused to listen. All summer we have been seeking assurance that there were in place the resources and the capacity on the ground to get the 50.4 million doses of vaccines that had been ordered into the arms of Canadians.

There seems to be some confusion between the role of the Minister of Health and the role of the Chief Public Health Officer for Canada. The Chief Public Health Officer for Canada has the responsibility to find a consensus with his counterparts on the science and then give the best possible advice to Canadians. Canadians needed clear and unambiguous messages. Instead, there were too many opinions and conflicting guidelines, and the resulting dangerous confusion. His job is also to give the best possible advice to the Minister of Health, including his assessment of the need for additional resources for communication and/or improving front line public health capacity.

The Minister of Health has the responsibility to act on his advice, listen to her provincial and territorial counterparts, and then go to cabinet and make her case to be able to deliver what is needed to protect the health and safety of Canadians. Wrapping itself in some constitutional cocoon is a dangerous approach for the federal government.

There is a difference between health and health care delivery. In 2003 David Naylor's report on the lessons learned from SARS quoted Disraeli: “the care of public health is the first duty of the statesman”. It is time for the minister to do her job and help her minister of health colleagues across the country. so that their public health authorities can deal with this health emergency now. It is time for statesmanship, not time for an ideologically-based mantra of “not a federal responsibility”. She is Canada's Minister of Health.

The lack of an effective national communication plan has meant that doctors and nurses administering the vaccines are spending time answering questions that could and should have been answered all summer.

As information changes, the federal government has a responsibility to spend the dollars necessary to ensure that Canadians truly understand the facts and what is expected of them. The public education campaigns from the NHS in the U.K. or the CDC in the U.S. demonstrate what a proper public education campaign should look like, especially the effectiveness of the campaign targeted to children, which is totally missing in Canada.

Last weekend it was the father of a child who had died from H1N1 who explained that shortness of breath was not a normal symptom of influenza. He said he wished he had known that earlier.

Since June, the doctors in Manitoba have been recommending a public awareness campaign to make sure that every Canadian with influenza who is experiencing shortness of breath would immediately seek medical attention. They were worried that the morbidity and mortality of patients they had seen in Winnipeg could have been dramatically reduced if they had presented to hospital earlier.

Two weeks ago, we asked a number of local medical officers of health across the country if they felt ready for the vaccine rollout. They had been given no certainty of the quantity or the starting date of the supply.

They described a total absence of sensitivity of the operational realities, the logistics of storage and security, let alone setting up clinics with so little notice. They described a total absence of central leadership, a lack of clarity and no commitment to the additional resources that would be necessary.

They insisted that the front lines had to know what to expect and what not to expect. They had no idea of the costs and no idea of what would be reimbursed. They were worried that the demonstration projects had not been built and that no money had arrived on the front lines. Medical officers of health were being asked to go to their local boards of health or regional health authorities and municipal councils handcuffed by the lack of information.

This summer when we drew attention to the lack of planning and resources for aboriginal communities, the minister was telling us that 90% of the communities were prepared while the grand chiefs and our personal experience were telling us something quite different. The unfortunate body bag incident followed a lack of response to the ongoing criticisms by the first nations community of the local regional office of Health Canada. The government responded well by appointing the respected Dr. Paul Gully to First Nations and Inuit Health and things have improved.

There are many questions that will have to be answered later. Having only one production line in one company available for all the vaccines needed for Canadians has clearly caused delays. Priority must be to have the shortest possible gap between the arrival of a pandemic and the time when a significant percentage of the population has been immunized.

I cannot believe that any MP on any side of the House could look at the lineups in his or her riding and be able to say that this response to the pandemic is being executed properly or blame some other jurisdiction. We need to redouble our efforts as politicians to immediately secure the resources necessary to help local public health units get on with the vaccination campaign, additional funds for school-based campaigns, and hire back retired nurses.

We need to ensure, as soon as we have the promised three million vaccines, that we get them into the arms of Canadians as quickly as possible. We also need to ensure that hospitals and family doctors in our areas are confident that they have the resources necessary to look after Canadians who do get sick.

In a visit to B.C. Women's Hospital on Friday, I was truly impressed. Its patients are all immunized and it certainly seems ready.

It is indeed a fine line between our due diligence in holding the government to account and partisan grandstanding. We believe that the government has a huge role to play in the response to this pandemic. We will do our job and we want the government to do its job.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry]

Madam Speaker, I will start by saying that all of us in the House are very concerned for those affected by the H1N1 virus. As a parent of a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, I was particularly impacted by the stories last week and what those families went through.

I want to talk about the facts. The facts are that six million doses of the H1N1 vaccine have been delivered to the provinces and territories. There is enough vaccine for all priority groups. Canada currently has more H1N1 vaccine per capita than any other country in the world. That is a fact.

We have heard many very tough-minded questions from the Liberal Party over the last few days. I am wondering if the Liberal Party has done any research on how many lives will be saved because of the actions of this government.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Madam Speaker, as I explained, the critical point in any pandemic is the time between when it arrives and when 60% to 70% of the population is immunized. With every week, the longer it takes, there is a risk of increased mortality and morbidity. This rollout has not happened properly. I am too concerned that lives will be lost.

[Jack Layton, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Madam Speaker, as we have looked at the lineups in our communities, I think all of us have concluded that something has gone wrong.

People should not have to head to clinics that have been hastily put together at 4:00 in the morning, hoping to be able to have the administration of a vaccine. That simply should not be happening.

The fact of the matter is that the government has not taken care of the crisis the way it needs to do. In fact what we see here is a tendency of the government to point fingers at the provinces or drug companies and others instead of taking responsibility.

I would ask the member to comment on whether or not she agrees with me that the government should be stepping up and saying that the administration of the medication, the financing of the programs to get the vaccine to people when they need it should be financed on the same basis as the vaccine itself.

Right now the federal government is not sharing in that responsibility. That is one of the reasons we are not seeing the vaccine delivered the way it should be.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Madam Speaker, I believe that there were to be negotiations in terms of additional resources for rolling out the vaccination program.

As the member for Vancouver Quadra said today in question period, there is a problem in the actual rollout in Vancouver as we await the Olympics. The medical officer of health for Vancouver has received not one penny from the federal government to help roll out this plan. She also has not received money for mass immunization clinics.

Across this country there is a patchwork quilt of worry. We could do better if the government would break open the piggy bank with “pandemic response” written on its side.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to know what my colleague thinks of the quote , “The facts are that the federal government was responsible for making sure that there was enough vaccine for Canadians...[Prime Minister's] Chief of Staff Guy Giorno was sitting in for the planning meetings for the rollout of the vaccine”. That is from Rob Russo of CBC News Now on November 1, 2009

We have spent—

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I will have to interrupt the hon. member to give the member for St. Paul's the opportunity to respond. There are 40 seconds for a response.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will let the member finish. It is questions and comments.