Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that.
Happy new year to everyone on the call today. I appreciate everyone's taking the time out of their busy schedules to understand the importance of what we're bringing forward to all committee members. We really believe there is a failure of federal leadership and ability to manage this pandemic.
What does that leave? Unfortunately, that leaves the provinces simply with the ability to continue to restrict and lock down Canadians. That is having significant negative impacts on mental health, suicide rates and people's ability to do business, etc.
When we realize that all we've given provinces is the lockdown mandate, all of the things that my great colleague Mr. Berthold mentioned—the potential for therapeutics and the rollout of rapid antigen testing—are going to be really important as we go through this pandemic.
We know we're almost into the third year now. We also understand there has been poor planning since the very beginning and that the acceptance in the early days of mRNA vaccines and the procurement thereof has been sadly lacking. Obviously, in the last several weeks, the use and procurement of rapid antigen tests has been sadly lacking. Finally, the domestic manufacturing of rapid tests, vaccines and PPE has been non-existent.
My dear colleagues, I would say that if we were in a wartime state now, we would be fighting a war without bullets and without guns. That's the type of footing we're on now and we're seeing these disastrous effects.
The other thing that's important to remind people of is the sad underfunding of health care. The poor transfer payments that we continue to see from the federal government to the provinces are unacceptable. We continue to blame lockdowns on the system, when the system has been sadly underfunded for such a terribly long time.
We all know there was a significant backlog in the system even before COVID happened. There is absolutely no way on earth that we're going to be able to catch up on the backlog at the current time, given the stress on the system.
All of those things packaged together, in my mind, point to a clear lack of federal leadership in the health system. They point to the significant need and the responsibility we all have here on the health committee to ensure that we update Canadians on what's going on, so that they can begin to have some hope moving forward. We know that the majority of Canadians have lost hope, and they've lost hope because there hasn't been good federal leadership.
Those are my points, Mr. Chair. Again, I appreciate everyone's taking the time to be here today.