Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the Leader of the Opposition for his leadership in bringing forward a debate that concerns all Canadians. All Canadians watching tonight are unified and should be unified in their concern about the topic we are looking at. For those who are watching, I want to break down exactly what the problem we are facing is and what the Prime Minister and the Liberals need to do to fix it.
Tonight we are trying to get answers on the COVID-19 vaccine. Canada has a huge vaccine shortage. This week, Canada got zero doses of vaccine, none, while countries around the world like Romania, the Czech Republic, the United States, Italy, Spain, France and virtually every other country that had a contract got doses of the vaccine this week. That is great for their citizens, but what about Canadians?
The Leader of the Opposition did a great job empathizing with every Canadian watching this debate tonight. Those who are watching are probably sitting at home feeling the mental health effects of not seeing loved ones, losing a job or losing somebody to COVID. It has been a year so far and we need to move on. I am sure nobody watching this tonight wants to keep hearing about more lockdowns and more removals of civil liberties. People who are watching this debate want us to get it right. They want to see solutions from the government.
A year into this worldwide crisis, things have been developed to get us out of the crisis, such as rapid tests, therapeutics and vaccines. The problem with Canada is that, as a democracy, a G7 country and a leader in the world, we have not been provided with those tools by the government. Therefore, it is incumbent upon every person in this place to ask why and to get those answers. We should not be sitting in lockdown and talking about more curfews and more restrictions. We should not be asking Canadians to sacrifice more. We should be asking our government to do better. That is what the Leader of the Opposition did tonight.
I want to break down exactly what the problem is, how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.
This is my suspicion. About a year ago when all of this started, I really do not think the federal Liberals or the Prime Minister took the pandemic seriously. We saw that because they did not lock down the Canadian borders. They did not want to cancel flights from China. They said there was no person-to-person transmission of COVID. They were relying on data that was not coming from Canadian sources. They were doing a lot of things to downplay this issue. Let us talk about what that means in the context of a vaccine.
We know that the federal Liberals at that time when they did not think it was a big deal, and here we should remember that Canada did not close our borders until middle to late March last year, signed a deal with a company called CanSino. This company has ties with the Chinese government. They put all of our eggs, all of Canada's hopes that we are now relying on to get out of lockdown, in that basket. I do not know why. We do not have a lot of clarity on that. The Leader of the Opposition, I, and all of my colleagues have been fighting for answers on that. I think they were working on scientific diplomacy with this company, and not actually getting Canadians vaccines.
What does this mean? Because they were working with this company, and I do not have any evidence to the contrary because we have not been provided with contract details to refute this, we wanted the government to succeed, but because it put all of its eggs in this one basket, it failed. The Chinese government would not roll the dice.
We did not come to the table. The Prime Minister and his cabinet did not get Canada to the party. We were late to the vaccine negotiating party with the companies that were producing vaccines that would work, like Pfizer and Moderna. We are seeing these plane loads of vaccines coming in, giving hope to countries like Brazil and the United States, but not here. That is because our government did not come to the table.
What have we been trying to do to address this issue? We have been trying to get information, because with information we can create solutions. If we do not have information, if the Canadian public, those who are watching, do not have information, we cannot create solutions. Therefore, we need to know why the government started negotiating those contracts so late. Why? What did it actually negotiate?
Pfizer, within a year, created this amazing product that could stop the pandemic in its tracks. Why is it that other countries this week are getting vaccines, but we are not here in Canada? We need to know that. Why is that? There have to be reasons and those reasons lie in those contracts.
Because Conservatives have been trying to drive to solutions, want Canada to get vaccines and want the government to be successful, we tried to pass a motion in the House for the government to release some of those details and be transparent with Canadians. What did it do? It put forward a minister who said that we are not going to get any vaccines if those details are released. It is politics at its worst at a time when we need to come together. Information means answers, information means solutions, information means vaccines, information means an end to lockdowns.
What has disappointed me is that in the last few weeks we have seen the government do something that no government should do in a situation like this, which is point fingers. The federal government said that it is the provincial governments' fault, but provincial governments cannot deliver vaccines they do not have and it is the Prime Minister's job to get us those vaccines. The federal government even said that it was the drug manufacturing company's fault. Maybe it is, but we do not know because the government will not release the details of those contracts. Even a lot of media today are asking why it is not releasing those details.
Countries around the world that are facing production delays are starting to put forward the details of their contracts, saying that they are going to fight for the remedies they have in those contracts, the recourse they have when things go awry with companies, so that their citizens have a tool to move forward, but the federal Liberals and the Prime Minister have not been doing that. We do not know.
To move forward, the first thing the government needs to do is make those details public so that provincial governments of all political stripe can start planning for the delivery of these vaccines, so that when provincial governments talk about ending lockdowns and ask about the variants, they have some hope or some information on these variants. That is what the Conservatives are fighting for: we are fighting for that information, to start. We are doing that at committee meetings by compelling ministers to appear, and this is happening with all of the opposition parties. We are working together on this because we understand that this is not about politics; this is about getting answers.
Tonight, this debate is about holding the federal government's feet to the fire and telling it to come clean so we can move forward. There are so many other things. Last night, I was on national television with a senior Liberal MP, who was put forward by the Prime Minister's Office to talk about vaccines and these issues. He started talking about how a lot of the federal government's plans were banking on vaccines that had not been approved by the government yet. Information means vaccines, information means a way out of lockdowns, it means hope and the government could not tell us what the approval process was for these vaccines or how many doses it ordered. That needs to stop; it really does. We need to have those answers. We need to understand what happened so that we can move forward.
For those watching tonight, I do not care if they vote Conservative or not. We are all Canadians and we need every Canadian to help us demand answers on this. That is the only way we are going to move forward and what my party wants. There are a lot of stories. I encourage people watching to ask themselves this one real question: When could I get a vaccine if I wanted one? Right now, the Prime Minister cannot answer that question. That is a big problem because it means that we do not have hope as a country while other countries do. We need to do better. It starts with that information and with demanding more.
As the Leader of the Opposition said, it is about doing better to provide hope and compassion for all Canadians. On this side of the aisle, that is what we are fighting for.