moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
Mr. Speaker, in my opinion this is probably one of the most important debates that we will be having in this place for many months to come.
Regrettably, we called for this debate about a month ago when the member for Cumberland—Colchester requested the debate. In the ruling from the Chair, and I think it was a fair ruling at the time, it was suggested that maybe the timing was not right, that there was not enough information and that maybe we should wait and revisit this.
The House has been in recess for a couple of weeks. I reapplied for this special debate on April 23 and today being the first day back, the Chair agreed that the timing was right. A number of circumstances have developed since then and this emergency debate was granted.
Mr. Speaker, I give you and your staff full credit in recognizing the importance of allowing the debate to take place.
Sadly, the government has not come into the House and uttered one line that would provide Canadians with any level of comfort at all on this issue. In fact, I would have to say that the government has been in hiding on this issue and as a result of that a lot of circumstances that could have been avoided were not avoided.
Mr. Speaker, in my letter to you today I pointed out that one of the important things that we must do in this place is provide a level of confidence or information to the people, or at the very minimum, exchange ideas. I want to quote directly from my letter of April 23. I said:
Ignorance and panic are significant enemies in battling this disease. A debate in the House of Commons would allow the government to place facts before the House. Members of the House of Commons would also have an opportunity to express their views on the measures taken...
I would suggest that, in fact, members of this House might have some ideas for the government, ideas that could be debated, examined and information exchanged. That has not happened up until this evening. The debate, in my view, is not about the outbreak itself, but rather about the federal government's response which can only be described as too little, too late.
All of us in the House, regardless of political stripe, commend the work of the scientists, health care professionals and public health officials, all of whom have succeeded in containing the outbreak and reassuring a very worried and nervous public.
The difficulty with SARS of course is the fact that there is no known cure and so the best that we can do is to contain or control the outbreak. In our opinion, the tragedy of this is that individuals were let down by the highest level of government in the country. Health Canada officials did their work, as did their provincial counterparts, but sadly our elected federal government did not do its job.
In fact, there is a raging debate, not only within your caucus, Mr. Speaker, but within the government itself on--