Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman.
I am pleased to rise today in the House to speak to our motion. It is an important one, but it would not have been moved if the Prime Minister and the government had just answered the questions that the opposition parties have been asking for weeks and even months.
Canadians are worried, and we are too. We are worried about the virus and the pandemic, but we are also worried about how this government is handling it. I will name just a few examples of this government's poor management since the beginning of the pandemic. The Minister of Health allowed our pandemic alert system to be shut down just a few months before the outbreak of COVID-19. The government sent hundreds of thousands of masks, gloves and gowns from Canada's main stockpile to China. A month later, health care professionals and first responders were asking us to ration our PPE because our supplies were running out.
I was a member of the emergency health committee that was struck in January, and we were already talking about the importance of restricting entry at the border. At that time, we were told that there was no problem and that everything was fine. There were all those questions, and then there was also a lot of dithering around masks. At the time, the Minister of Health even said the risk was low. Everything was managed very incompetently. It must be said that all the opposition parties raised good points and proposed solutions at various committees and here in the House. We were not there to cause conflict with the government. We were there to try to protect Canadians and prevent the virus from having a negative impact on their health and our economy. Most of the time, however, our proposals were rejected out of hand on the grounds that we did not know anything.
Now we have very urgent questions about the infamous plan that everyone has been talking about since this morning. We know that there is no way of knowing the exact date. People in the media are asking questions, but we do not know the exact date. However, just because we do not have an exact date does not meant that the government cannot put a plan in place. It could develop a plan that includes phases and a model that could be applied. The plan could explain what will happen as of the first day approval is received from Health Canada. It could explain how the vaccine will be distributed, who will get it first, where people will be vaccinated and how. Canadians deserve answers from the government to those kinds of simple questions.
This week, I watched a report on Radio-Canada about the situation in Germany. Germans are known for their precision. Just think of German cars and German technology. Germans are very detail-oriented, and their government lived up to that reputation by preparing a plan. The Germans also do not know the date when they will get the vaccine. They do not know that yet, but they know exactly where and when those vaccines will be distributed. What is more, they know that it will take less than two minutes to vaccinate each German citizen. That is how detailed their plan is.
Other countries like France and Great Britain are starting to administer vaccines and have already told their citizens what to do. We do not understand why, here in Canada, all we are told is that we have the best vaccine portfolio in the world. The Prime Minister told the House that other countries were envious and wondered why Canada had ordered so many. The Prime Minister is saying that we have 10 doses of vaccine per person. That is a talking point that was invented to get him out of trouble.
The former environment minister was once filmed in a bar telling people around her that, in the House of Commons, if you keep repeating the same thing, people will eventually believe it is true, and it really drills your message into the collective consciousness. For weeks now, the Minister of Health and the Prime Minister have been telling us that Canada has the biggest and best vaccine portfolio in the world. That is what the government wants to put into everyone's head. In the army, that is called a psychological operation.
Psychological operations, or psy-ops, are campaigns conducted by various countries to influence their citizens. We recently found out that the government wanted to create a psyop cell here in Canada to influence Canadians. It was lucky that we found out, because the idea was dropped. That is serious.
No one is here to score political points. We are in the middle of a global pandemic. Economies have ground to a halt. Back home in Quebec, restaurants and gyms have closed. Stores are even being forced to tighten their rules. People are being asked to stay home, and if the trend continues, they might not be able to see each other at Christmas. There is nothing funny about that.
As I mentioned, we are not here to score political points. We are not trying to win anyone's vote in the next election. We want to solve the problem. The people, our constituents and our voters are asking every party for answers, and indirectly, the provincial premiers, who have the heavy responsibility of managing their citizens, are also asking us for answers. The Quebec premier and his government are the ones having to establish rules, and he is being lambasted by people who are understandably upset, fed up and exhausted.
The federal government has the major national responsibility of providing the best information available. We need this information, and it has to be accurate. If the government says that it signed the vaccine agreement later than expected and that it will receive the vaccine on February 1, we will do what we must to get through the next two months knowing that we will get the vaccine on February 1. The government really does not want to provide that information, because it does not want to suffer a political backlash now and be told that it was too slow and mismanaged its contracts and agreements, so we are going to have to suffer longer.
This reminds me of a speech I made recently about courage. The Prime Minister and the government will eventually need to muster the courage to tell it like it is. Canadians are not dumb. People want to know what to expect so that they can act accordingly.
When the public is left in the dark, that is when we start to hear alternative theories, like conspiracy theories. That starts when people do not know what is going on. However, the government does not seem interested in communicating information, other than repeating that it has the biggest vaccine portfolio in the world.
Judging from what the Prime Minister says, it sounds as though we could vaccinate about 40 countries, but that is not what we need. There are 38 million Canadians, so we need 76 million doses to vaccinate everyone. It is as simple as that. We want to know exactly when we will get the vaccines.
The government might not know the exact date, but I am sure it has a pretty good idea. We know that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, is about to approve the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and Health Canada has already said it would follow suit, so that will obviously happen sometime in the next two weeks.
However, we know the Americans signed their contract on August 5 and gave Pfizer $1.9 billion U.S. to reserve the first 100 million doses, which will then be distributed across the U.S. It is right there in black and white in the contract and in the U.S. government's official documents. They also asked Pfizer to distribute the vaccines on the ground itself.
Obviously, the Americans will get Pfizer's first 100 million doses. That is why we are waiting in line. We say that and the Liberals tell us it is not true, but facts like that confirm it.
What I am asking of the government today, December 3, is that it provide us with a clear plan explaining exactly what is going to happen after the holidays. It needs to give us a date, whether it be January 15 or February 1, for example, so that the provinces can make arrangements accordingly and so Canadians know that, unfortunately, they will have to wait. This could have been done better, but on the political side, evaluating the government's performance will come later. What we need right now is a plan so we can see where we are headed at this very moment. That is what Canadians and everyone else are waiting for.