I too am becoming frustrated with spinning our wheels. I certainly believe what almost everyone here says and claims: that we want to get back to what we actually should be doing as a health committee, which is studying the health impacts of the pandemic. Instead, we're spinning our wheels.
However, I think the Conservatives knew this when they put this motion on the table, when they put in a whole bunch of things regarding procurement of documents that they knew were going to be problematic to the Liberals and yet chose to include them. I question how real their desire to start looking at things really is.
What they've done in this motion is conflate two things. The first part is getting back to looking at COVID, which I absolutely agree with. The second part of the document is about procurement of documents, which is absolutely pretty problematic.
There are all kinds of live issues. Part of the problem with the procurement of documents is that they're looking at dead issues. They're looking at what has happened in the past.
If we really want to be studying—and we ought to be studying—this second wave and what we can do now to help Canadians deal with it and help the economy deal with it, the best way is through having a sound health approach. There are all kinds of health issues that we could be studying, should we choose to do so. There are all kinds of issues related to vaccines, such as how we could develop vaccines potentially more quickly and the issue of procurement of vaccines.
I absolutely agree that there are many issues around testing. We haven't heard much from Conservatives about strategies for testing. It's not just about having rapid test kits. Having rapid test kits is important, but there is also the issue of strategies behind testing. You have to look at the value of rapid test kits in particular circumstances, especially if you're going to use rapid test kits where they want to use them—for instance, when you go into northern indigenous communities or when you go into a factory and say, “Oh, let's just do a rapid test kit.”
Whether that's valuable or not depends on the incidence of the disease in the population. You have to understand, before you say “Let's do rapid test kits, because doing so is going to solve all the problems”, that potentially it doesn't. If you have a high enough incidence of the disease in a population and you don't have a completely sensitive and specific test, it doesn't help you in ruling out disease.
There are also many other issues, such as contact tracing. Obviously many provinces are not doing contact tracing really well. Apparently they've given up on it in places in Toronto. What's that about?
There's the global approach. I'd like to see us look a bit at that. COVAX is an attempt globally to ensure that people around the world have access to vaccines. There's the ACT-Accelerator, which hasn't received a whole lot of press, but it is an attempt by WHO and a number of other international agencies to address the pandemic.
The first part is to get back to studying it. Yes, absolutely. Then there is a second part, the procurement of documents.
I believe in transparency, I really do, but I also appreciate what the ministry and the department are saying, which is that you're asking for a whole lot of documents at a time when, as Mr. Barlow correctly said, this is our biggest health crisis and maybe our biggest crisis in the last hundred years. It is Health Canada officials who are centrally dealing with it. Now we're asking them to suddenly produce tonnes and tonnes of documents and have them all translated into French. I think maybe we should be trying to whittle down a bit the list of what we can and can't produce.
There are also concerns about our relationship with the provinces. Obviously health care is primarily a provincial jurisdiction, and our ability to co-operate and deal effectively with the provinces is integral to the way we deal with the second wave. To produce documents that could potentially embarrass the provinces or harm our relationship with the provinces wouldn't seem at this time to be a good idea.
One of the bottom lines to what we ought to be doing as a committee—and I want this to be working too—is that we should be concentrating on the live issues, not the issues that have occurred in the past.
Certainly this procurement of documents is obviously to dig up some dirt and to look at absolutely everything, but what has happened has happened. I don't think this is the time to be reviewing everything that has happened since the beginning of the pandemic. Our function as a committee would be better served by dealing with issues that are still live issues. If we actually get our act together, perhaps we can start dealing with these problems in a constructive fashion, rather than battling each other.
I'm quite happy to face the fireworks on the procurement issue. I think we have to do it. The opposition wants those things, but why don't we leave that issue to a later date? If anyone actually watches what we do on the health committee—which is questionable, but if they do—I think the Canadian public might justifiably be saying, “What are they doing? Here it is, a pandemic, and they're arguing over procurement of documents.”
I would suggest that we leave it for two or three weeks and start looking at the actual issues again. Yes, you will come back to it, and it's important that you do, because you are the opposition, and that's what you do. However, why don't we leave this conversation for a later date and start actually doing something useful instead?