Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The Standing Committee on Health is tasked with looking at issues related to the health and safety of Canadians. Right now, we are in the middle of a pandemic.
I am concerned that in several places across the country we are seeing record numbers of COVID cases, months into the pandemic. I'm worried about people losing their lives. I'm worried about regulations having to be put in place again to shut businesses down. I think there is no greater job for our committee right now than to be looking at—in a very pragmatic, calm way—whether the government is looking at this issue appropriately. Are there things that we need to do differently so that we can provide some stability to the Canadian public at this time? That is the motion that is in front of the House this afternoon. I want to remind my colleagues that this motion is to be voted on this afternoon.
I want to address some of the issues that my colleague brought up. I did so already in a national press conference this morning, but I'll go over it again.
First of all, with regard to the issue of confidentiality, the motion itself has many different provisions for confidentiality, including the issue of confidentiality around vaccine production and so on. The law clerk is tasked with doing the redactions. If the Liberals on this committee are concerned about that, we should have the law clerk as our first witness here, and the law clerk can tell us about their approach to redactions. If we need to discuss this in the House, there are ways that we can discuss it, but instead of trying to get to a “yes”, I can tell you what the Liberals did over the weekend. We know this because we had pharmaceutical companies call our party and say, “The government called us and said that X, Y and Z were going to happen. What's going on?” Instead of trying to get to “yes”, the government was trying to fearmonger on this stuff with pharmaceutical companies while we saw cases of COVID-19 grow.
At this point in time, I can only surmise that what the government is trying to do is orchestrate an election around this issue. Now, in terms of this being an issue of confidence, it is Parliament's job to scrutinize expenditures related to issues like the COVID-19 pandemic. That is what this committee is being tasked to do, including with regard to the production of documents. I am very confident that we can manage this in a professional way. I am very confident about the motion itself. I do firmly think that we should look at the results of the House vote this afternoon before examining this motion.
I'd also like to talk about the supplementary estimates. This committee has not reviewed the supplementary estimates yet. Given that there is a House vote this afternoon, I do move to adjourn debate on this motion.