Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the commendation. I really did enjoy working with her on the immigration committee as well, and with my colleagues from east and west who are also on the committee with us right here in the House. It is a pleasure to be on the health committee, particularly at this important time in our Canadian history with COVID being so relevant across the whole country.
As I pointed out in my speech today, it is so frustrating to see the reluctance of the government to move, even on the rapid testing, faster than it is to make sure it could be used as an option for the many businesses we could be keeping open in this country. That is one of the things we need to look at right away. We are looking at a situation where we have many people who want to go to work and cannot.
We need our tourism industry and our airline industry, which was here in the House making presentations yesterday. We need a proper rapid testing mechanism, like many of our allies and even other countries in the world are using right now, which we do not have access to yet. I will back up on that a little as the government did make it available, but as I pointed out in my own comments about the letter we wrote from our Manitoba caucus to the minister, when the Manitoba government tried to purchase those rapid tests it was told it could not because the federal government had the contract for them all and would distribute them however it wanted. We received 100,000 tests yesterday and we still do not know where they are going.