Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in response to the throne speech.
I would like to start by offering my condolences to the residents of my community who have lost loved ones and friends and, frankly, to the people across Canada who have lost loved ones and friends to COVID-19.
We are rightly focused on the path ahead, and how we are going to support Canadians. However, it is always important to remember the toll this pandemic has taken. By keeping that in mind, it will motivate us all the more to make sure we are doing the right things going forward.
I also want to thank a few other groups of folks, before I talk about the throne speech. In my community, and I know in communities across Canada, heroes have emerged. One of those groups of heroes is our health care workers, those doctors, nurses, technicians, personal support workers and others who have stepped up, worked on the front lines and who have taken those risks, especially in the early going, to serve Canadians. I want to thank them for their service.
I also want to thank a lot of our front-line essential workers. Member will remember that early on, in March, April and May, when much of the economy had to shut down, or at least people had to work from home, some folks still had to go to work. They went out there and they kept our economy going, supporting our quality of life. I want to thank them for that, especially those in my community, in Etobicoke Centre.
Last, I want to thank those in my community who stepped up to help others. A tremendous number of people in my community and in communities across this country are struggling. People in my community have stepped up, whether it is by volunteering at or donating to a food bank or delivering food to seniors or driving people to medical appointments or whatever the case may be. They have been there to help others, and I want to thank them for that. I have been really impressed with how our community and our country has come together.
Early in the pandemic, I imagine I faced what a lot of MPs faced, which was a tremendous number of phone calls and emails from constituents asking for help, asking for help to access health resources, asking for help because they wanted to weigh in on what government was doing, or asking for help because they were struggling, they had lost their jobs or their incomes had been cut or had declined significantly.
I got a particular phone call, one that was very memorable to me, from a constituent asking for help. Before she got into what her ask was, she asked me how I was doing. I shared with her the fact that we were receiving a tremendous number of calls and emails, and that people needed a lot of help. I said to her that I had run for office to help people, and then she cut me off. She said that I was certainly getting my opportunity.
I share that story because to me it underlines an important point for us that I think we should all remember today, that we are at a critical moment in time and that we all have an opportunity, especially those of us in elected office in positions of decision-making or responsibility, right now. We are at a critical time where Canadians need us and we have an opportunity to support them, and to make our country stronger in the years to come.
I hope that we seize this opportunity. It is on that note that I turn to the throne speech, because when I think about what we need to do, I think about supporting Canadians, I think about making sure that we protect them from this virus, and I think about building back better. The throne speech focuses on those things.
What I would like to do is just highlight a few of the items in the throne speech that I think are particularly important. First off, on protecting Canadians, there are a number of measures that have been taken, starting with controlling the epidemic by encouraging social distancing, travel restrictions, border closures, and tracing and quarantining of people who have tested positive. We have also increased health system capacity, made tremendous investments for the provinces so that they can boost their health system capacity and cope with the COVID-19 cases. We have been very active in investing significantly in treatments, specifically in vaccines.
We have done a tremendous number of things to make sure that we have contracted for vaccines, that the manufacturing capacity is in place, that we have contracts with the various folks who are researching these vaccines, so that when a vaccine is ready, Canadians will be able to access it.
There is also the $19-billion safe restart agreement. It is interesting to hear the members of the opposition ask what the government has done to support provinces and their health care budgets in this difficult time. The $19 billion seems awfully significant to me, and a lot of that money went to health care. It went for testing and contact tracing. There was $2 billion for the safe return to class fund to make sure that when provinces opened their schools, they had our support in making sure those schools were opened safely, and that children and families were protected.
These are some of the things that have been done to protect Canadians from the virus from a health perspective.