Dear friends, Madam Chair, before I start, I really feel I have to acknowledge that today we come together to remember, pay tribute to and grieve for all those we have lost to COVID-19. We reflect on the sacrifice, the hurt and the suffering, and we offer comfort to doctors, nurses, frontline workers, survivors, families and communities. We promise to learn the lessons.
Thank you to my extraordinary colleagues, Ryan, Stéphane and Ginette, for your speeches.
Ginette, most recently, thank you for your caring. We are all so profoundly sorry for your loss.
To my dear colleagues, my apologies for my absence recently. I have missed you all.
At this time, it's nice to be able to celebrate, so to Peter and his wife, I wish a very happy 40th wedding anniversary. We all need some light, happy anniversary.
When it comes to the motion, I understand the politics of this motion. However, every single day, Canadians are becoming sick with COVID-19, they are being hospitalized and they're dying. Our focus has to be on Canadians. The COVID-19 pandemic remains a public health emergency, an economic crisis, a social crisis and a human rights crisis. There is nothing that is more important than fighting the pandemic, and we are still fighting the pandemic. We have new variants, and even if we suppress the virus in one country but it is allowed to spread to other parts of the world, the variants and perhaps with new mutations can cause new outbreaks, even in countries that seem to have the virus under control. We have all endured a year of tragedy and crisis. COVID-19 is the most challenging crisis we have faced since World War II, and it's not finished, yet we are arguing over politics.
Moreover, as countries and communities continue our fight to contain cases while rolling out vaccines, the global rollout has been far from even and fair. As of mid-February, 130 countries had not received a single dose of vaccine, and just 10 countries had administered 75% of all vaccines. We must remember that we are one human family, we are interdependent and what happens to one person can quickly affect many others. A cluster of pneumonia cases just over a year ago has translated into over 117 million infections and 2.6 million deaths. If we do not ensure vaccine equity, the virus will continue to spread, to mutate and will ultimately prolong the pandemic, our vulnerability, with devastating impacts. The reality is that we are one small planet with one human family. Disease knows no borders, and through the pandemic and beyond, we are truly in this together.
The point is that responding to COVID-19, recovering from the virus and preparing for the future must remain our focus. We all have to learn from the pandemic. We can't forget what we have all been through, and we need to prepare for the future. This includes our work at this very committee. Lessons learned and pandemic preparedness should be a focus of this committee. Each of us knows COVID-19 very personally. It has touched all our lives—doctors, nurses, frontline workers, survivors, family members and communities—and the virus has done so in ways we could not have imagined a year ago.
All of us know families who are grieving loss. We need to acknowledge their pain and be there for them. We must address the grief, loneliness and stress and provide much-needed mental health supports. We need to lift each other up and inspire hope. We need to think of everyone on the health care front line who has been at this for a year. It wasn't a wave. It was sustained and it has been gruelling and hard. I thank the tireless frontline health care workers, and in Etobicoke North, particularly William Osler Health System for their life-saving services.
I also thank the Rexdale Community Health Centre and its partners for their important community care, including providing health services, delivering food and providing computers and internet access.
A friend of mine who is a physician says that each patient who dies leaves a scar on the heart.
We also need to think of all those on the front line who do not have the luxury of Zooming in to work but who provide essential services, from those working in grocery stores to personal support workers, to truck drivers—everyone who worked to keep our community and country going. We owe them so much more than our collective thanks. We must tackle the glaring inequalities of age, disability, gender, income, race and more that have been laid bare by the pandemic.
In Toronto, where I'm from, in August racialized people made up 83% of reported COVID-19 cases while making up half of Toronto's population. They are more likely to live in poverty, poor housing, have precarious work and be victims of discrimination. All of these lead to worse health.
We have all been touched by the pandemic. I think of the mother who not only has to work but also help her young children learn. I think of students preparing for apprenticeships, college and university, or preparing to make their start in the world, and of what they have lost: a loss of contact with friends, a loss of activities, mental stress. One year is a long time.
I think of grandparents in long-term care, scared and alone. Long-term care facilities bore the brunt of wave one, with more than 70% of deaths occurring among those aged over 80, about twice the average of rates of other developed countries. Tragically, it happened again in wave two. I think of the several long-term care residences in our Etobicoke North community.
Deaths among seniors are not just numbers. Our seniors are people we know, people we have listened to. We have heard their life stories, learned from them, laughed with them, sung with them and danced with them. I dread going back to our long-term care, because I know those people, and I wonder who's not going to be there.
I think about the 48th Highlanders veterans at Sunnybrook Hospital for whom we danced. Eight decades ago, they stepped up for our generation and for future generations. Their motto was Dileas Gu Brath. It means “faithful forever”.
We owe all our seniors who have helped build this country safe and dignified care. The greatest tragedy of this pandemic is the lives lost in long-term care homes.
I think of people with disabilities in congregate settings. I think of the homeless. I think of indigenous peoples. I think of the taxi drivers and the truck drivers in the community I serve, who picked up travellers in the spring at the airport only to succumb to COVID-19.
The point is that it's our families and communities that should be top of mind now: protecting their health and safety, their jobs and their livelihoods. Think of the thousands who work here in the parliamentary precinct. Think of our clerks and the teams that support this very meeting. These are our colleagues, our friends who work to maintain the people's House. What lessons do they want us to learn? What lessons do they want carried forward for the next pandemic, disaster or for next time?
What Canadians needed this past year, what they need a year into the pandemic, is to know how best to protect themselves, their families and communities. They need economic support.
I strongly believe that our focus has to be on protecting the health and safety of Canadians, protecting jobs and livelihoods and the economic recovery, and not on scoring partisan political points.
In order to protect the health and safety of Canadians we closed the borders. We directly funded the provinces and territories. We bought personal protective equipment and testing kits, and we pre-ordered vaccines.
The most important thing we can do to address the spread of COVID-19 is to vaccinate, test, contact trace and isolate.
Our government bought the vaccines and tests and provided contact tracers and quarantine hotels. In the spring, when the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces were needed, they went in to care for our elders, for our families.
To protect jobs and livelihoods, the government put in place strong measures to protect businesses and workers. We had to do this because the virus could only be slowed or stopped by limiting social contacts. This meant reducing economic activity. It meant shutting down workplaces and later limiting the number of people restaurants served. It meant asking people to stay home from work if they were sick or their children were sick. It simply would have been unfair to ask businesses to shut down and workers to stay home without compensating them for lost income.
The reality is that the best economic approach is to stop the spread of the disease. The next best approach is to help Canadian businesses and Canadian families weather the pandemic without losing their livelihoods and without going broke.
We must provide meaningful investment to build our way out and to ensure our economy comes back stronger than before, laying a foundation for a green economy, an innovation economy and a fair economy that supports good jobs for all Canadians.
To rebuild from job losses and strengthen our economy, we will launch a campaign to create more than a million jobs. Families should not have to choose between their health and their jobs, and our families should not have to take on the debt that their government can better shoulder.
Pandemics are not the time for partisan politics. It's time for the country to come together to protect one another and to begin to heal, but we have to acknowledge the hurt first and there are a lot of people who are hurting.
We call daily into our Etobicoke North community to hear how people are doing. Our Etobicoke North families matter. They are good people. They work hard. What makes Etobicoke North such a special place to live, work and play is that we welcome the world. We are proudly one of the most diverse communities in the country. We learn from one another, and we learn each other's beautiful cultures, languages and religions. We look after one another, and we lift each other up.
We ask how our families are doing and what is on their minds, and the answers are invariably the same: protecting their health and safety, jobs and economic livelihoods.
My friends, we have done good work together in this committee in putting in place virtual voting and coming together to produce a report on the best way to protect Canadians and democracy should an election happen during the pandemic, but there is more good work to be done, important work.
Will we clearly remain in the throes of responding to the pandemic? Our focus must absolutely be the response.
It will also be important for this committee to review the parliamentary precinct response. Was there a pandemic plan? Who was consulted in the development of any pandemic plan? How often was any plan reviewed? Once it was known that something new was circulating in late 2019, on what date was any pandemic plan first looked at? Was any plan updated in January and February? What actions were taken during January and February to protect the health and safety of all those who work on Parliament Hill?
Was there any consultation with Canada's chief public health officer in December, January or February? Was there any consultation with Canada's chief scientists? Was there a review of Parliament's response following the 2009 H1N1 pandemic? When was any plan updated following H1N1? Was a tabletop exercise ever run for Parliament following the H1N1 pandemic?
Did each of the major groups in Parliament know about any plan for security, pages, those who provide food and more?