Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my talented and esteemed colleague from Manicouagan. She is the deputy whip, which means she helps me with my duties as whip.
Madam Speaker, I am always pleased to see you, someone who lives in my region of Montérégie, in the chair. I hope that one day you will sit in the chair as the Speaker. I think we are ready to see a woman Speaker manage the House of Commons. Perhaps that will be the case in the next Parliament.
I am pleased to speak to the motion that was moved in the Standing Committee on Health on October 9. I must say that the motion did not come completely out of the blue. Ever since it was first moved, the Liberals have been filibustering. For those watching at home, filibustering means that they were preventing debate and discussion by burning up time. Some call it filibustering while others call it stubbornness and a waste of time. It is a major waste of time in the exercise of democracy.
There is a parallel here with the WE Charity situation. I used the English name, WE Charity, because the French name, “organisme UNIS”, means nothing in Quebec. We have been using the English name for weeks.
The government is taking parliamentarians hostage to stop them from asking important questions. The government has given up on being transparent about its management of government business.
The Conservative motion we are debating today is not perfect. This study would take a long time, but it is an important one. We need to get to the bottom of this. The Standing Committee on Health needs to debate other issues as well. One example is a study on drug costs, which was proposed by the Bloc Québécois. Obviously, the time wasted on filibustering is time we no longer have to debate the motion, to get to the bottom of things and to study other important aspects of this pandemic.
Essentially everyone agrees that we are managing one of the most serious pandemics in history. There have been others, but the members of the House unanimously agree that this is an exceptional pandemic. We have been somewhat overwhelmed by the situation and that is why we want to further study how the government managed the crisis.
The motion contains several elements. It proposes to study access to rapid testing. It is up to Health Canada to study the tests and decide if they meet Canadian standards and it is up to the federal government to approve them. What we have come to realize and know is that it took the government a long time to receive and accept the rapid tests proposed by Health Canada. The second wave arrived, but the rapid tests were not ready. These tests quickly provide results to people who believe they have COVID-19 symptoms. Not only does this prevent them from spreading the virus to others, but they also do not lose out on hours of work, especially in the case of PSWs working in hospitals. It is very important that we obtain these rapid tests.
The government has been very critical of the provinces and their management of the pandemic. It has had many criticisms, especially about how Quebec managed the pandemic. Unfortunately, there have been many deaths in our long term care facilities. Seniors were hit hard and directly affected by the virus. It is up to the government to quickly provide the provinces and Quebec with these rapid tests. It is dragging its feet a bit. If we had the tests at the start of the second wave, management of the pandemic would have been completely different.
I will provide a much more specific example. In my riding, there are three regional county municipalities, Vaudreuil-Soulanges, Haut-Saint-Laurent and Beauharnois-Salaberry and three women's shelters for victims of domestic violence. These shelters are not designed to allow the women to maintain enough distance to avoid getting infected. These community organizations offer essential support to these women, and if we had rapid testing, that would certainly help them provide faster, more responsive service.
I have another example. In Quebec, the government decided to leave schools open and created bubble classes. If a teacher is infected, the entire bubble ends up in isolation. Access to rapid testing would help determine within hours of the onset of symptoms whether it is necessary to have the teachers and students isolate at home. Access to these tests is very important and it is the federal government's responsibility to procure them for us.
The government is quick to tell us that we are not doing our job properly and goes so far as to come tell us how to run our long-term care facilities. However, testing is the government's responsibility and it has not been up to the task.
Let's not forget that 20% of our caregivers who contracted COVID-19 were guardian angels. If a rapid test had been available, personal support workers caring for seniors and social workers working with seniors could likely have taken the test the moment symptoms appeared.
It is already October 22, and it is very important for the government to explain to us why the provinces still do not have access to rapid tests.
We have been talking about seniors a lot, and with reason, but we need to remember that, before the pandemic, many people were already suffering because of a lack of health care services. That includes people with mental health and addiction issues, people experiencing homelessness and children on the autism spectrum. All of those people were suffering before COVID-19, but the pandemic made it clear that Quebec's health care system is stretched thin. It has not been easy: Managers and workers are doing a lot with less, they are optimizing resources, they are coming up with quality indicators and abiding by the strictest possible standards so they can provide quality service to the majority of those who need it. The fact remains that the health care system does not have the means and resources it needs.
The motion therefore proposes to examine the need to transfer money that belongs to Quebeckers to Quebec so that it can invest in its health care system. The provinces and Quebec have asked the federal government several times to give them the funding they need to do what they are in the best position to do, which is to help and care for people. However, it is obvious that Ottawa does not want to do that. The federal government wants to maintain control. It is resisting and opposing that request, and it is even being arrogant toward Quebec and the provinces in that regard.
Can the government and the Liberal Party do something constructive and quickly propose clear amendments that will enable us to move forward with this study and prevent the Standing Committee on Health, which is so important, particularly during a pandemic, from being paralyzed? It is up to the federal government to make the next move. We are appealing to its good faith and, as they say, the ball is now in their court.