Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time, to the extent I can, with the hon. member for Parkdale—High Park. If he has a chance to speak tonight, he will be superb.
I want to start by thanking the incredible health care workers in my riding, at the Jewish General Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital and all of the long-term care centres in my riding, which have been at the centre of the COVID epidemic. They have done a wonderful job.
Let us be clear. We all want vaccines as soon as possible. Tomorrow is not soon enough for any of us. This is not a Liberal issue, a Conservative issue, a New Democratic issue or a Bloc issue. We all want vaccines. Everybody is doing their best. Provinces are doing their best and the federal government is doing its best. We should not be blaming one another.
There will be times that provinces will have vaccines in freezers because they were not able to distribute it fast enough. There will be times that provinces are short in vaccines because our supply chain is not working as effectively as we would like. In the end, let us try to accept that everybody is being professional and doing their absolute best.
That is why, before I start talking about vaccines, I want to talk about disinformation. We have a responsibility to not exaggerate. We have a responsibility to look at what happened in Washington a couple of weeks ago and to recognize that the words of politicians have great weight. I penned an op-ed with my friend from Parry Sound—Muskoka about the dangers of politicians spreading disinformation, and I think it is an apt lesson.
Whenever we have an evolution in technology, whether it is the printing press, radio, motion pictures or social media, it gives an opportunity to those who would want to spread disinformation a much greater breadth to do so.
In the United States, we had groups such as QAnon touting conspiracy theories that fed into a president who denied he had lost an election. There were people tweeting that Dominion voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden, and that was retweeted by the president, members of the Senate, members of the House and those whom the public trusted. When those whom the public trusts spread disinformation and fear, and make people believe an election was not legitimate, we have events like we did where democracy itself was attacked at the Capitol.
My plea to all my fellow members of Parliament is that they can be dissatisfied with what the government is doing, but let us all not exaggerate. Let us try to be accurate in what we are saying. For example, it is not accurate to say that the government has no plan on vaccines. People can argue they are not satisfied with the plan, but there is a plan. There is a plan that people have heard over and over. It is a plan that is up on a website.
It is a plan that has 80 million doses coming in from Pfizer and Moderna by September. Every member of the Canadian population who wants to be vaccinated will have a dose in Canada to vaccinate them by the end of September. We know that we will get six million doses, four million of Pfizer and two million of Moderna, by the end of March. We know that starting in April, there will be a great ramp-up where millions of doses will be coming into Canada. We will need to be ready for that.
We know that the vaccine is not everything. We know that even Israel, the country that has been the most successful in rolling out the vaccine, still has many thousands being infected on a daily basis. We still need to continue with social distancing, washing our hands and following provincial government public health measures.
The federal government is absolutely rolling out a plan, and it is a plan that is actually doing better than we even said at the beginning. The Prime Minister originally said he did not expect doses to come in until January. We had almost half a million doses in the hands of Canadians right after the end of December. There are more than a million doses in Canada today. We are fifth in the G20. We are not last; we are fifth. Out of all of the EU nations, as of yesterday, we are doing better than 21, and we are doing worse than six. To argue that somehow we are the worst in the world is completely unfair and untrue. Someone can say we should be first, we should be the best and we should be like Israel. That is fair enough, but let us not exaggerate.
There are professional purchasers who have been out there since last spring preparing for this moment. Originally, Canada did not have PPE. We had to source all our PPE from abroad. Now more than half of our PPE is made in Canada.
In the same way we sourced PPE and managed to domestically manufacture PPE, we have professional purchasers in the department of procurement who have worked for months and months and months to sign contracts with seven vaccine providers. I heard tonight that because of a deal with the Communist Chinese, somehow we were not preparing to sign with anybody else, but this is utterly false. Moderna has stated that we were one of the first countries to sign with Moderna. We were not one of the last; we were one of the first. The spokesperson for Pfizer, Christina Antoniou, said we were the fourth country to sign an agreement with Pfizer. We were not one of the last; we were one of the first. Again, please let us not spread that type of disinformation.
When it comes to the very, very disappointing shortfall of Pfizer, let us recognize Pfizer has told the world that to ramp up production in Belgium, there will be a four-week shortfall among all the countries being supplied by the Belgian plant.
It is true we received none this week, and everybody is making hay of it. Last week we received 83% of our doses, and some of the European countries that are getting more of their doses this week received almost none.
The Minister of Procurement has clearly stated that over the course of four weeks, as Pfizer has assured her, there will be an equitable distribution of what comes out of Belgium to all the countries served by Belgium. It is clear; she said it. Pfizer said it. If members want to blame Pfizer for retooling its Belgian plant and not having thought in advance that it would need more doses, then fine. However, it is unfair and untrue to claim that because European countries are getting more than Canada this week, Canada is being treated inequitably by Pfizer. We do not have those stats.
I also heard today that the website came down. The website with our plan did not come down. The website is still there. The only part that came down was Pfizer's forecasts, because we do not have the Pfizer forecasts going forward for the next couple of weeks. We want to be accurate. The Moderna forecasts are still there.
I want to make sure that when it comes to these issues, we understand that while it is fair to be critical, it is not at all fair to exaggerate. We need to be calm and prudent and understand that Canadians are looking to us for leadership on this and many other issues. The more we show that we are being rational and clear-headed and the more we are able to show that we can get along and work together as team Canada, the better we will do in rolling out vaccines, keeping Canadians safe and hopefully finding our way out of COVID-19 by the end of September.
I will be very glad to take questions from my colleagues now.