Madam Speaker, I want to mention that I will be sharing my time with the member for Foothills.
Today's debate has to do with vaccines and how hard it is to get vaccines, but I want to take this opportunity to say the following.
This evening, I heard many of my Liberal colleagues talk about a lack of co-operation on the part of the opposition parties, particularly the Conservative Party. I would like to remind everyone that, exactly one year ago today, when the virus first appeared, it was the Conservative Party that called for an emergency meeting of the Standing Committee on Health to talk about the virus. As the shadow minister for public safety, I personally attended the committee meeting to ask questions about what was happening with our borders. At that time, on January 30, 2020, I was told that the government was beginning to look into that. From the start, we have taken a collaborative approach.
What we found worrisome was that the government, the minister of health at the time and the Prime Minister were somewhat in denial. They said that this was not dangerous, that there was no need to worry and that Canadians did not need protection or masks. They said that the virus was not transmissible. From the start, the government was in denial, which worried us.
Then we realized that the easiest and fastest way to stop the virus in Canada was to control our borders, so that is what we called for. I said that the border was our first line of defence. The government did nothing. It said it was watching this closely and that border service officers were providing information to international arrivals. We said that much tougher measures were needed. Sometimes we were told that Canada is a big country and the territory is huge. I am trying to understand, but the fact is that there are three major international airports: Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. If we direct our flights to those airports, we are talking about three locations. Even though the country is 10 million square kilometres, we can still control three airports. That is no worse than a smaller country with the same number of airports.
What bothers us is the government's very weak and listless response. If we had worked together as team Canada, if the government had agreed that what the Conservatives were saying made sense and we could have agreed on how to respond, then we could have easily worked together.
It is easy to say that the opposition parties do not want to co-operate, but we are taking concrete action to try to work together. It is not working. At some point, we have to come to an agreement.
Over the past year, the key word, as far as I am concerned, has been “consistency”, and this applies at every level, whether we are talking about the border, vaccines or even economic programs like the CERB. When it comes to matters involving the government, “consistency” will be the key word for me in 2020 and early 2021.
We are doing what we can to help. Even when discussing the economic agenda, we brought forward solutions whenever we saw a problem. Just because we are an opposition party does not make us stupid. We are still experienced people. We already had lives before becoming MPs. We brought forward amendments, and they were rejected out of hand. Worse than that, they publicly said that the Conservatives do not want to help Canadians...