Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to rise to speak to this important issue today. I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Battlefords—Lloydminster.
I am pleased to rise after the member for Milton so I can correct the numerous amounts of misinformation we just heard in his speech, which was written by an expert, I am sure, in the Prime Minister's Office. He talked about how the government has been so great at providing information, and how it has led the world in its response.
This is a government has been wrong or late every single step of the way, and it has resulted in pain, suffering and even death for Canadians. The Liberals were late to close the border, weeks behind other nations, like Australia, which saw the pandemic coming, which did not rely on information coming out of other countries, like China, but relied on its own experts, something the Liberal government did not have the opportunity to do because it had shut down the early pandemic warning system months before.
The Liberal government destroyed PPE that we could have used, and it shipped PPE off to China when we desperately needed it here at home, leaving us short-handed. It gave bad advice on masks. They told us at the beginning not to use a mask, and that it was more dangerous to use a mask than to not wear one. The Minister of Health said that COVID-19 does not spread person to person, and that if we wanted to close the border, then we were actually racist.
This was the rhetoric that was coming out of the government. It is no surprise that Canadians have no confidence in what the government is putting forward now, and when they see the government now saying “Just trust us, we have your best interests at heart”, it is a little hard to take when every piece of advice that has been given for the last 10 months has either been wrong or late.
The Liberal government was wrong on the border. It was late on rapid tests. It has been, quite frankly, incompetent during the period between the two waves. We are no further ahead now than we were back in March, when we locked everything down.