Thank you.
Happy new year to everybody.
I am hearing two messages. The overwhelming one from the Conservatives is that this is about team Canada, that we're all on the same side and are all working towards the same goals—although there was a smattering in there of, “It's all our fault, we suck, and it's all because we suck that we have the problems we have now”. I don't agree with that, and I won't enter into that conversation.
I encourage working together. At least at the beginning of the last session, this committee worked very well together. We have a great mix of people on this committee from various backgrounds, including a bunch of people with medical backgrounds. Because we are a group of members of Parliament discussing this issue, we have a fairly unique ability to shine a light on various issues with respect to COVID, whether that's the value of rapid testing or of therapeutics, which I talked a lot about in the last session.
I think we did a pretty good job, actually, with COVID. I believe our committee was one of the first to talk about asymptomatic transmission—i.e., transmission of COVID by people who are asymptomatic—before the need for mandatory masks and spacing intervals between vaccines was really impressed upon us. We were pretty well on top of that. I hope the fact that we publicized it may, in some way, have contributed to faster action.
I am glad to hear these words coming from the Conservatives. I take it that it will probably also come from the members of the other parties. Let's work together; we can do a valuable job.
This sucks. My family, my kids, are in the other room here. They're not at school. Their hockey games were all cancelled, as the season has been cancelled. My parents are going nuts in Thunder Bay, because it's 20 below every day and they've been used to being in Mexico for the last 20 years. Businesses are suffering. There are people with mental health problems. There are overdoses. It goes on and on.
This is extremely important. Let's try to put partisan politics behind us and work together to shine a light on problems and make some useful suggestions as to how to deal with them.