Thank you, Madam Chair.
As an irregular participant on this committee, I do greatly appreciate the opportunity to contribute and to learn.
I'd like to tip my hat to Mr. Turnbull, whose contributions this morning have been illuminating.
I'd also like to appreciate that MP Vecchio is seeking to transact parliamentary business as between the parties, and I'm sure that the proper individuals on our squad will ensure that conversations happen, as appropriate. Being an irregular member, I don't want to interfere in any way that would be untoward, of course.
Members may recall when I had the opportunity last week to reflect on the relevance of prorogation and the particular point in the pandemic where we were late last summer. Obviously, we've moved to a different place now, and I think there is actually a fair point to be made that this entire exercise is a moot one. We're long past late summer.
As we appreciate it, we responsibly prorogued for a brief period of time in order to come back with a Speech from the Throne that could lay out a concrete vision in a moment where Canadians were looking for what are the next steps. We felt that was the responsible measure to take, as a government, and that's exactly what we did and why we did it.
That moved directly into a fall period of significant parliamentary activity, leading right up to the fall economic statement, which laid out a large number of concrete measures. I want to get into some of those today because I think one can only understand the relevance and the importance of the prorogation component by appreciating exactly what it led to: the Speech from the Throne, which recommenced parliamentary proceedings; going straight into a fall economic statement; and then of course more parliamentary debate through the winter, leading to the budget. So there is a continuum here.
I think it's important for Canadians to understand that this is all regular and dutifully conducted parliamentary process that is required as part of good governance and it's required as part of our Westminster parliamentary democratic tradition. I think we're all well aware of where prorogation fits into the tradition that we come from, as part of the Crown's various reserve powers.
We all appreciate that we are no longer at a point in history where all of governance is the product of royal prerogative. Nowadays there are very few such royal prerogatives, including prorogation. Centuries ago, when pandemics wreaked havoc on many societies, in both the Commonwealth and beyond, we lived in an era when the king or queen owned all the lands, made all the laws, raised armies to defend the people and attempted to conquer new territories to increase the wealth of the kingdom, and enforced the laws and then meted out justice. Over the past four centuries, those royal prerogatives have been whittled away and now we are at the point where Parliament controls virtually everything. Our democratic system is much more robust and there are very few powers, as I said, prerogatives that reside in the Crown, and one of them is prorogation. That is why the Prime Minister is required to bring to the Governor General that request for prorogation, and it was done responsibly.
I think that MP Turnbull and my learned colleagues have repeatedly articulated the rationale for this, and obviously the motions on the floor would seek to bring some greater level of clarity and accountability around the prorogation decision.
As I have said before, my own opinion is that this is a moot discussion. Canadians would want us to focus on the future and the future of vaccines, the future of economic recovery, the future of a return to normalcy for Canadian families and for seniors like those at St-Joseph's Manor, who I visited this morning via Zoom, who want nothing more than to say hello to their families in person.
I'll pause on this tangential point just because it is such a lovely thing. I learned this morning that the good residents at St-Joseph's Manor in Campbell's Bay got their second shot this week. That's stupendous news for those good people in Campbell's Bay on the north side of the Ottawa River, maybe 80 kilometres west of Gatineau.
That's what people want to be focused on right now. They want to focus on what we are doing to get to the next point of bringing us back, and that's what our government has been dong all along. Every single moment, every single decision has been focused on how we are contributing to making sure that Canadians can return to seeing their loved ones and can spend more time doing the things they want to do with fewer restrictions, how we can invest in the necessary fashion to procure and distribute vaccines to rebuild our biomanufacturing sector, how we can render more robust our overall health care system, how we can assist other levels of government, and how we can collaborate with other levels of government to bring about additional supports at critical times of need.
I think our hearts go out and our support is extended to those regions of the country that are, right now, really struggling, that are so challenged by this third wave, whether it's Peel Region, Nova Scotia or Alberta. We have regions that are really just focused on the here and now, and rightly so, because that's what matters.
I think many of my constituents in the Pontiac would express great frustration at the notion that there is a national debate to be had around prorogation decisions made late last summer with a view to enabling a pivot after the first wave and before the second wave took hold.
Let's take a quick step back, and think about what prorogation enabled. This is why it's so important to focus on MP Turnbull's amendment, and what he would propose that we focus this committee's work on. If indeed there is to be time spent staring in the rear-view mirror, let's focus on what prorogation enabled.
The prorogation allowed us to come up with an action plan for the second phase of the pandemic by means of a throne speech. Everyone knew that this second wave was coming, because we had seen what was going on in Europe.
We knew that we had to prepare for it by providing assistance to our workers, our small and medium-sized businesses, and our communities, which were suffering seriously as a result of the pandemic. The throne speech clearly indicated what emergency measures our government would be introducing. Additional protection was needed for our municipal players, and more funding.
That's what led to the throne speech and the 2020 fall economic statement. A wide range of measures and economic analyses of the situation were presented. In November 2020, the 2020 estimates had not yet been tabled because of the pandemic. It was therefore both necessary and important for our economic players to properly understand the situation through reliable data so that they could plan the April 2021 estimates.
My colleagues are no doubt aware of the contents of the 2020 fall economic statement. The information therein was about priority problems for the Canadian public. Table 1 showed the number of doses of potential vaccines obtained per person. Last fall, the discussion was about the number of doses that Canada had obtained from various companies, including Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax. It's interesting to see how the discussion has evolved since then.
We are now in a completely different position. On my Twitter account, I tweeted that in terms of the number of doses administered per 100 persons, Canada is now one of the leaders, along with Germany, the United States and Great Britain. The situation has changed considerably. We were in a very good position with respect to access to vaccines as soon as they were approved by Health Canada. After only a few months, 35% of Canadians had received their initial vaccine, and this percentage is increasing daily.
I will now return to the 2020 fall economic statement.
As you can see, we have turned the corner. The statement was about what had happened in the spring and how we had got to where we were in the fall. It mentions the deployment of the Canadian Armed Forces in Ontario and Quebec to protect the health and lives of our seniors. It also discussed contributions from the Red Cross and the ongoing efforts of the Canadian Armed Forces.
During the first wave of the pandemic, public policy and economic action evolved.
When we look at the different measures that were put in place, from the Canada emergency response benefit to the Canada emergency wage subsidy to the Canada emergency business account, there was an evolution with the collaboration of opposition members. There was an evolution of emergency policies all designed to bend the curve to protect our frontline health care workers and to help people to stay at home and stay healthy while continuing to pay their employees, pay their rent, pay their mortgages, stay on top of their bills and put food on the table.
By the end of summer 2020, we were in a different place. I think we can all reflect back. MP Shanahan will recall—
Sorry to disturb you out of your stupor. I know sometimes I can drone on. MP Long is looking at me as though he's paying great attention. That's well appreciated, MP Long.
MP Shanahan will recall how we had planned a Quebec caucus trip to les Îles de la Madeleine. We were looking forward to working hard together to discuss what could be done as we emerged out of the first phase and pivoted, knowing that there was a second phase to come. History being what it was, we weren't able to meet, which was too bad. We are all looking at Quebec caucus members to go back to les Îles de la Madeleine and to be greeted by MP and Minister Diane Lebouthillier to consider next steps for now. I recall at that moment we were looking at going there just so that we could take stock, step back and assess what had just transpired and then look to the future.
At the time we weren't even 10 months into a mandate. The government was in exactly the same position. The government, along with governments across our country in our provinces and territories and municipalities, had confronted the urgent necessities of this pandemic and had put in place the bricks and mortar programs that could sustain families, businesses and workers. It was the moment to look forward to what would be next. What did we need to do to improve the supports? How did we need to invest more? What did we need to do to address revenue issues and expenditure issues? That's what the Speech from the Throne enabled.
Canadians in my riding of Pontiac demanded to know where we were going, and rightfully so.
As I see the fall economic statement, I think about the importance of enabling the presence of our Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland before this committee to discuss that continuum of how we were going to be pivoting from the first phase of the pandemic into the second phase. I think it would be entirely appropriate for her to bring us through that moment, if this committee sees fit to continue to look in the rear-view mirror and to continue to examine the past.
I would argue that my constituents would rather we focus on the future, but that's a separate matter. I will focus on the amendment at hand. You'll pardon my underscoring of the fact that my constituents would much rather we focus on the what's next of parliamentary procedure, as opposed to what was in our past.
I am looking now at, and would refer my esteemed colleagues to, the second and third charts of the fall economic statement, focusing on the one hand on real GDP and employment rate respectively. Note the distinct difference between real GDP without direct support measures on the one hand and with direct support measures on the other hand. It makes very clear, literally, in black and white, in a bar graph, what the measures implemented by our government enabled in terms of GDP preservation and employment preservation. The third chart indicates that without the direct support measures, unemployment would have reached nearly 20%. Those kinds of numbers are inconceivable for most Canadians.
Due to the direct support measures implemented during that spike in the spring of 2020, the unemployment rate was kept somewhere around 13% at its peak, as opposed to 19%. The Statistics Canada information is clear, but it's not just the Statistics Canada information. This is from the Department of Finance survey results from private sector economists. It is the norm with all Department of Finance efforts in the context of the economic statements and budgets to seek that external data input to ground-truth what is being published.
That's a significant indication to the Canadian public, being provided in a transparent way, of the importance of the support measures that have been implemented. They've prevented us from falling into a situation of nearly 20% unemployment and, rather, keeping us between 10% and 15% and then that unemployment rate to declined significantly. I might add, it was much faster than the vast majority of our OECD partners and our G7 partners. We were able to make sure that the employment rate was maintained.
That's important in a future-oriented perspective, because what was happening, particularly through the wage subsidy, was the maintenance of a connection between the employer and the employee. The effort was to incentivize the maintaining of employment to keep the employer-employee units strong so that there would be fewer pieces to pick up.
Of course, our finance minister is far more eloquent than I am. Who you have here before you is a mere member of Parliament from Pontiac stumbling through the fall economic statement as best I can. I know that our finance minister would do far greater justice to the plan for protection of jobs and protection of Canadians' employment and then the pivot into a plan for growth once the virus is under control and the economy is prepared to absorb it. The plan, as articulated in that full economic statement, is to deploy a three-year stimulus package to jump-start the economy.
That's exactly what has just happened this past spring. I'm just pointing out a thread that everyone knows and sees as being entirely obvious. Everything seems obvious in hindsight, and of course we're engaged here in an exercise in hindsight. The finance minister indicated abundantly clearly that this is where where we were heading. We are heading towards consistent supports on rent subsidies with wage subsidies to our municipalities and to our provinces, procuring billions and billions of dollars of vaccines at federal expense to distribute to the provinces so they can manage their own prioritization processes of vaccinating so many millions of Canadians, which is turning into the great success of 2021.
That generation of Canadians will look back on the achievement and say, “Wow, I was there. I remember that moment. I remember how it felt so dark at Christmas at how frustrating it was to be separated from family. I remember being challenged in my mental health through the winter of 2021; it was dark.” It wasn't as cold as some of the winters; it was still cold, but not as cold. It was a tough start to 2021, and then all of a sudden the vaccines, which had been procured so carefully by Minister Anand and her Department of Public Works, started coming online as planned. There were variations week by week here and there, but month after month the numbers came in, far greater quantities, far larger amounts, because the contracts were well negotiated and because the portfolio was diversified. We didn't pick just one winner; we bet on all of the horses. Now those horses are racing into the stables, and we are able to work with our provincial partners to accelerate the pace.
I think what we're going to see in years to come is that we're going to say that was the moment we remember being able to say, “Kids, you can go to a movie.” We're just looking forward to that moment. We're going to be able to have that backyard barbecue. We're going to go and enjoy a spaghetti dinner with our community. We're going to visit the seniors residence. These are all the things that are going to be made possible through the massive injection of so many doses of vaccines to Canadians.
All of it relates right back to that important and necessary decision to prorogue, to reconvene Parliament under the banner of a Speech from the Throne that could clearly indicate to Canadians that this is the path; here is where we're going, and to bring forward a fall economic statement that put the fiscal meat on the bones of that plan.
I'd like to end by thanking my colleagues for being willing once again to consider assessing the relevance of a discussion about prorogation. We could even discuss the relevance of prorogation, given that we all want to focus our efforts on things that really matter.
I hope that the right decisions will be made, because that would enable the committee to have useful discussions.
I'm very grateful for this opportunity to discuss things with you today.
I will conclude with that. I greatly appreciate the time that I've been afforded by my esteemed colleagues.