Mr. Speaker, when putting everything through the Chair, sometimes I might overdo that. I should not use the term caucus, but there is no question that there is a raging controversy within the government frontbench, that is, the cabinet. The members of the Liberal Party who make up the cabinet are in complete disagreement. When the Minister of Canadian Heritage suggests that the Minister of Health dropped the ball and has not responded adequately as a minister of the crown, I think that is telling us something.
Again, as evidence of dropping the ball, where was the Prime Minister? The fact of the matter is that he was on a golfing vacation in Santo Domingo. Never once was he in Ottawa to address this in the last couple of weeks. That is deplorable. I can say the same for the Minister of Health. To my knowledge she never left the country, but she certainly was not in Ottawa on this file. In fact she was in a very deep state of denial.
With a disease where there is no known cure, and we may be months from that if we are lucky and we do get one, there is danger in that sort of laissez-faire management of government. The simple fact is that a lot of information was not communicated to the World Health Organization. I think that if we listened very carefully to the response by the Minister of Health when she was being pressed by one of Canada's leading journalists today, we would have heard that there is no question that the government did mess up on this file. She suggested that the process was wrong in which they communicated that message to the WHO, and information was wrong that they communicated to the WHO. There is a full understanding within the international rules that there is a process that has to be used and there is detail that has to be passed on to the WHO and that was not passed on by the ministry, neither by the health minister nor the Prime Minister.
The result is that today there is a huge cost to Canadians and the rest of the world. The reason for this is that we did not control the situation. We did not contain the virus quickly enough. In other words, the government did not respond quickly enough, much to the chagrin of the World Health Organization, and today we are paying a heavy price for that. Not just Toronto and not just Vancouver but the entire country is paying a price for it. Again, it is not just I who am speaking that way, but the Governor of the Bank of Canada, and just about anybody else who runs a business in this country will say the same thing. There will be a cost to Canada for not acting quickly and in a fashion that would have prevented the WHO ruling coming down hard on Canada. That is not a debatable point. It is simply what happened.
There was an urgency for the government to act in a manner that would be consistent in terms of what we would expect a government to do. The cost of not doing it will be felt for many months in this country, because we rely on tourism. We have just finished speaking in the House about the heavy costs to the aviation industry in terms of the outbreak. Much of that damage could have been controlled or minimized by the government in a quick and rapid response.
More important, when this first occurred, members on this side of the House were asking questions of the minister. How much information is exchanged in this place in the normal course of question period? I would suggest that it is not a lot. Most of the people who watch this place on a routine basis would say that most of it is showmanship to a degree. We try to ask questions that will embarrass the government and the government attempts to answer and try to get off the hook.
That exchange of information has to occur in 30 second spots. We have to abide by the rules of the House, as do the Speaker and the minister. In the course of a 30 second exchange on both sides, the minister has to articulate an answer to a question. There are limitations in that type of exchange of information: basically there is none. We were counting on the minister to give us an overview of what the government was doing and suggesting. That is why I think debate is important in this place. The minister does not have all the answers and neither do we as opposition parties. This is the highest court in the land. This is where laws are written. We do not interpret them, but I think that most people would interpret the government's response to this issue as being inadequate. If we cannot debate issues like this in this place, what are we here for?
Again, the government is in a constant state of denial. In fact, the heavy-handedness of the government is evident on the government side. Not one government member suggested that we should have this debate on the floor of the House of Commons. It was up to the smallest party in the House of Commons to proceed with this emergency debate. The member for Burnaby--Douglas, the health critic for the NDP, will be speaking shortly. He was the only other member to request an emergency debate today and he was in the House when I filed my request. We are members of the smallest parties in the House. That is the type of leadership one would expect from the Government of Canada and we have not seen it on this issue. Nor have we seen it on many other issues.
In fact, today a Liberal member got up the courage to demand an emergency debate on the cod closure in Newfoundland, which is an issue that is deserving of debate. That emergency debate will take place tomorrow evening. We can understand the pressure on this man not to do that. In fact, some discussion was held today behind the curtains and outside this place suggesting that he will be basically ostracized by the Prime Minister for suggesting that the debate should take place. We can understand why Liberal members, particularly those from Ontario and those from the City of Toronto, are hiding under their desks on this issue. They are taking their lessons from the top man, because he spent all last week hiding under his golf cart with regard to this issue. As a consequence of that deliberate evasion of this issue, we are stuck with a ruling made by the WHO which we should not have to live with.
In fact, today the World Health Organization told us that Vietnam is the first country in which there has been a SARS outbreak to completely control that outbreak. Canada is a country that at one time had the best health care system and information system in the world. We are now being outdistanced on this issue by Vietnam. Members should think about that. We have to give that country full credit because it did not duck the bullet, but the fact is that it could have been us, not Vietnam.
I should not say that the Prime Minister of Canada should learn something from this, because he is in his dying days in office and just holding on by a thread hoping he can make it through to next February. What price will the country pay at the next crisis if he does hold on until February? His number one replacement is now saying that the government is out of focus and admitting it is not handling many issues correctly or in the fashion one would expect a government to handle issues as critical as this one.
Let us talk about the role of the government and the roles of the Prime Minister and the health minister. That is where the Prime Minister can use the power of his office. Despite who the Prime Minister of Canada is, there is still an acknowledgement that despite our disagreements he is still the Prime Minister of Canada and that entitles him to do certain things. One of them is to bring together the provincial health ministers of Canada and come up with a strategy to deal with this from coast to coast to coast. Those are just some of the things that could have been done.
The health minister should be the last person in this place to interfere in this debate, mouthing off from the side as she enters the chamber, because she has been noticeably silent on this file for weeks, busy hiding under her desk, not owning up to her responsibilities. Evidence of that, as I pointed out earlier, is the WHO ruling, which falls clearly at the doorstep of the minister, and her inability to take her job seriously. Where was she when these questions were first raised on the floor of the House? There was a 30 second response from the minister on given occasions, regardless of whether I or other parties put that question to her. That was it and then it was a slide out the back door of this place without standing in the House with any detailed account of what she and the Prime Minister were doing on this file.
The fallout for this is not with the opposition parties. When she gets on her feet she will talk about the rhetoric, the extreme statements that we are making, but we have not made them. We have been more than responsible on this file in our role as the opposition. We are the ones who forced the minister to come into the House tonight to make a statement on this issue for the first time and hopefully take questions from individual members, because she might have actually reached the conclusion that this is the place where ideas can be formulated, where we can exchange information. Would it not be helpful for opposition members if we knew exactly what was on the mind of the health minister? Would it not be good if when we shared some of our ideas on what we would like to see happen the minister would actually take them under consideration?
This debate is necessary. I think the golf trips have to be over. We must have the Prime Minister paying attention to this file. If they had paid attention to this file I do not think we would be here tonight, because this spread of SARS would have not reached the proportions that it did last week. In all fairness, I think the situation is better this week than it was last week, but the key to this is containment.
I was watching the minister this morning when she was talking about implementing some new technology at the airports. The minister would like us to believe that this new technology only came about or was invented last week, possibly by the minister herself, but the fact is that this technology was there and was being used by other jurisdictions, including Vietnam, and that is why they got a favourable ruling from the WHO compared to Canada.
I look forward to comments by the minister and questions from some other members, but the fact is that it is refreshing to see the minister in the House prepared to give a statement on this SARS issue--finally.