Madam Speaker, the pandemic has shaken us all. It has revealed a lot about our situation. I am thinking of Quebec's health care system and those of all the provinces. We have seen the extent to which our health care system has been compromised.
The pandemic has also revealed that Canada was very ill-equipped for various pandemics, even though there had been at least a few dress rehearsals in the past, such as H1N1 and SARS. Year after year, there has been a decline in funding for the equipment and expertise needed to prepare for pandemics.
We saw the same thing with the health care system. If we go back a few decades, Ottawa had an agreement with Quebec and the provinces to split the costs of the health care system equally. This ratio made perfect sense, because taxpayers pay around the same amount in taxes to Ottawa and to Quebec or the provinces.
However, over the past few decades, the federal government has been consistently decreasing its share of funding. The largest drop was in the mid-1990s. Shamefully, this was part of Ottawa's response to the lost referendum in Quebec. Ottawa decided that it would cut funding to the provinces, slashing funding to Quebec so that it would no longer be able to do things on its own.
This created a certain paradox. Quebec's health care system, among other things, was under-funded. The same thing happened in the other provinces. Quebec made an ingenious move, in my opinion, and implemented a pharmacare program that, admittedly, does have room for improvement. That said, with little financial capacity, Quebec managed to do something ingenious. The same is true when it comes to family policy and the child care system or paid parental leave, all of which helped bring poverty down to a level below what it would have been without those measures.
A number of economists have even said that Quebec's child care system provides a net benefit because it makes it possible for women to remain active in the workforce. That is a plus. They keep their jobs and pay taxes, and children in the child care system get a high-quality early childhood education.
However, Ottawa chose to cut funding to the health care system, which has weakened it. This has become clearer than ever in this pandemic. One example is the terrible situations in our long-term care homes.
This Thursday, the Prime Minister is going to meet his Quebec and provincial counterparts to talk about health care funding. In my opinion, it is time to change course and try to catch-up. The government needs to provide more funding for the health care system.
As the Parliamentary Budget Officer has indicated in study after study, Ottawa is the one with the flexibility. That explains why the bulk of the extraordinary spending that occurred during the pandemic was done by this level of government. The flexibility is here, and that is significant. It relates to the fiscal imbalance. What caused the fiscal imbalance? It was Ottawa withdrawing funding for health care, post-secondary education and social services.
It is time we changed course. We can no longer afford to have such a fragile health care system. That is what we have learned from the current pandemic. We knew it before, but now it has become blatantly obvious, particularly when we think about the plight of the thousands of people living in Quebec's long-term care facilities.
The federal government could have played a very important role in health care in addition to funding it. Let's hope the government will have some good news about that to share with us at the meeting on Thursday. As I said before, properly funding a health care system, making sure our health care system is not vulnerable, is an investment. When crises like this one arise, that investment enables us all to get through it and get back on our feet faster. It pays off in the end. Let's not forget that, fundamentally, this is also a social equity issue. In our wealthy society, quality health care is a right. It should not be a privilege.
The government could have made things better on the health front by securing a dependable COVID-19 vaccine supply. We are now realizing that the government appears to have made bad decisions ever since the start of the pandemic. Worse yet, it appears to have dragged its feet.
We see that other G7 countries, specifically the United Kingdom, are preparing to administer their first vaccines. Countries around the world are announcing that immunization is imminent. Despite the good news we heard today—that we could have a few doses, a symbolic few unfortunately, before the end of the year—it looks like we will have to wait months longer than other countries. It is truly appalling.
It would be interesting to know how much it would cost society to delay vaccination by one month. I asked the Minister of Health this question, but of course she did not have an answer. As we know, absolutely crucial restrictive health measures were put in place to try to stop the pandemic from spreading further, but what is the cost of delaying vaccination by one, two, three or six months? These are questions that need to be asked and that the government needs to answer, because it seems to have been dragging its feet at the beginning of the pandemic. It appears that we will be vaccinated later than citizens of other countries.
Even worse is that just a decade ago, Quebec had a very strong pharmaceutical industry. We know that in the late 1980s and 1990s, Quebec became a pharmaceutical powerhouse. Working hand in hand, Ottawa and Quebec City managed to put in place a framework that would allow pharmaceutical companies to emerge, proliferate and thrive on Quebec soil, and it was a success. In just a few years, Quebec managed to attract five multinational pharmaceutical companies that have all developed a promising vaccine or are on their way to doing so. We had top-notch researchers and production capacity, including for vaccines, back home in Quebec. A few decades later, there is almost nothing left, nothing but dust.
I obviously commend the government's intention of investing in laboratories. These investments that were announced this fall come a bit too late, in my opinion, because it will take a few years to build the production capacity. This will not help us deal with the current pandemic.
Why did the government neglect this lucrative system that we could be proud of and that gave us expertise that we could have used during this pandemic?
In fact, there is every reason to believe that we could have received vaccines earlier. They might even have been developed here, whether in the greater Montreal area, Laval, Quebec City or Sherbrooke. That did not happen because Ottawa decided to abandon this sector, change the rules, and change the system. Even though Quebec redoubled its efforts to keep this expertise, it was not enough in this highly competitive environment.
Walking away from all that is unacceptable. I am so disappointed and upset. This must never happen again. We will see what the future holds with regard to vaccines.
I would like to raise another point about vaccines. I will go back a little further in time and talk about a company that manufactured quality vaccines. Why did Ottawa decide to drop this internationally renowned, publicly owned company that supplied vaccine strains to almost every country in the world? Why did Ottawa allow this company to be dismantled and then sold?
I am referring to Connaught Laboratories, which was located in Toronto. Connaught was established in 1913 and had a rich history. Unfortunately, in the early 1970s, it was sold to a Crown corporation and ceased its previous activities before being fully privatized in the late 1980s. That is what happened under past governments of different stripes. Connaught had the ability to produce vaccines at little cost and had an international reputation.
The bad decisions made in the past partly explain the delays we ar going to experience. These are important issues. We must reflect on them. Perhaps history will teach us not to repeat these unfortunate mistakes.
A number of sectors were left out of the government's pandemic response, but there were some positives. I will come back to that in a moment. In my opinion, seniors were largely forgotten by the government.
Seniors are the ones who have been most isolated during the pandemic. They are really struggling, and we are thinking of them. They often live alone and will likely not be able to celebrate the holidays. They have been isolated for months. On top of that, they are staying home and having their groceries delivered, since they have been warned that seniors are at greater risk. All of this contributes to an ever-growing grocery bill.
This segment of the population has been forgotten for years, even decades. Many social policies have been adopted and implemented for families and young people, which I will say is great. However, there have been few or no meaningful policies to support the well-being of seniors, even as their cost of living has increased while their purchasing power has decreased.
I am thinking about old age security, which has not kept up with inflation and is therefore not where it should be. Even before the pandemic, when we would go visit people in seniors' residences, we saw it and heard about it; people would tell us that the cost of the rooms, the rent, and the cost of everything was going up while their incomes were going down, thereby reducing their purchasing power.
It had gone down so much that during the last election, the Liberal Party committed to increasing old age security. We did too, but while the Liberal Party promised to do that only for people 75 and older, it was out of the question that we would create two categories of seniors. The increase had to apply to everyone 65 and older because they all deserve it. We owe it to them, because they have helped us so much their entire lives. It was the least we could do to ensure tax equity and fairness.
After a very lengthy tug-of-war, we managed to wrest a symbolic cheque out of the government in early summer. A second cheque was to follow, but it has yet to materialize, much like a complete reform. This needs to change.
That being said, I must commend the good the government has done. From day one of the pandemic, it has implemented several income support economic policies.
We do not want to act like our neighbours to the south and pretend that the pandemic does not exist. That has had serious consequences and made health care costs go up. In Canada, we decided to quarantine and bring in measures that would reduce activity—
