Thank you, Chair.
Of course, I support the amendment. I believe also, procedurally, in terms of how the standing order works, that any documentation that is circulated to the committee has to be in both official languages. I think this amendment just re-emphasizes a requirement that's already there but, of course, we provide it.
Just with regard to what would be tabled in both official languages through this amendment, I think my colleague Mr. Powlowski suggested that we shouldn't be supporting this motion because we would be mean to big pharma. Something's wrong here. We haven't received doses of the mRNA vaccines that the Prime Minister promised. We're nowhere near being on schedule. It is our job as parliamentarians to be scrutinizing why this happened. The information that we need to do that is in these contracts. It is preposterous to me to be arguing, “Well, you know, the vaccine manufacturing companies might not give us the vaccine if we ask questions.”
Think about that for a second. Think about what an average Canadian would think listening to a parliamentarian argue that we shouldn't be looking for information on whether or not a company has broken its contract. It's really one or the other. It's either that the Prime Minister is lying, or that the companies are delivering on schedule and the Liberal government just negotiated a poor delivery schedule. It's really one or the other.
That's the real reason colleagues here are hesitant to support this. I don't care about the politics of the situation; I just want a vaccine. I actually would like Justin Trudeau to get vaccines for Canadians at this point in time. Our job as parliamentarians is to scrutinize information like this so that we can put pressure on the government to rectify situations that aren't working.
Mr. Powlowski also stated a very good fact: We are at the mercy of every other country in the world right now. As a committee, we should be finding out exactly how much we are at the mercy of other countries and then coming up with solutions to solve the problem. In order to solve the problem, we need information to know how bad the problem is. The argument that we should somehow be bending over and not asking questions because big pharma might get mad at us is preposterous, given the scale and gravity of the situation we're facing right now.
Yes, I support the motion. I support the amendment. I hope we can just get on with business so that the law clerk can start producing these documents.
Thank you.