Madam Speaker, I would like to begin my speech by reminding members of a few things that have happened in recent weeks and months.
Members will all recall that, in December, the Prime Minister stood before the door of Rideau Cottage and announced that Canada would receive 125,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine every week in the first month of 2021.
On January 5, the Canadian Prime Minister once again stood before the door of his cottage and told us that he was frustrated with the pace of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. During a press conference at Rideau Cottage, he said, “Canadians, including me, are frustrated to see vaccines in freezers and not in people's arms.” That is what was reported by CBC, and those who were watching him heard him say that.
This proves that the Prime Minister had absolutely no idea what he was talking about or what was going on at that time. In fact, the Premier of Quebec was quickly rebuked by his federal counterpart when he also made a statement at his press conference indicating that all the vaccines Quebec received every week were used every week and that Quebec had the capacity to vaccinate 250,000 people per week. However, the federal government planned to send only 233,000 doses to the province by the end of January.
That was in early January. The Quebec government also said at the time that it could be vaccinating four times as many people, but it did not have enough doses. Those statements were made at a time when the Prime Minister was saying there would 125,000 doses available per week in Canada. That is how January began.
We are currently in the last week of January, and what is happening? Whether in Quebec, western Canada, Ontario, the Maritimes or the territories, it is the same everywhere. One number comes to mind when we think of the number of people vaccinated this week: zero.
Why? Because zero is the number of vaccines Canada got from Pfizer this week.
What does that mean? Clearly, it means that no one was vaccinated this week: not one vulnerable person, not one senior, not one essential worker.
When we see what is happening in other countries, what we must ask ourselves is, why? Why did Canada not have access to any vaccine doses in the last week of January?
We do not know how many doses we will receive next week, but we are still being promised that hundreds of thousands will arrive in the coming weeks and months and that the majority of Canadians who want the vaccine will be vaccinated by September.
I would like to remind members that the Prime Minister is making these announcements when just two months ago, he was saying we would receive 125,000 doses a week from Pfizer. One month later, we are coming to realize that his plan was untenable. How can we believe the Prime Minister when he tells us that all Canadians who want the vaccine will be vaccinated by September 2021?
Why is the Prime Minister acting this way? It is simple. He prefers his daily show at Rideau Cottage. He can give Canadians information while knowing that he can give more the next month, and the next, for as long as he gets to give press conferences in front of Rideau Cottage.
Why are there no vaccines? It is because the Prime Minister staked everything on one contract, with a Chinese company, instead of trying to sign agreements with pharmaceutical companies so that we could manufacture the vaccine here in Canada.
While the Liberals were staking everything on the Chinese vaccine last spring, our allies were signing agreements with AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer. Canada did not sign agreements with these pharmaceutical companies until months later.
All Canadians are paying the price for this leadership failure, because the Prime Minister is not being straight with Canadians, he refuses to disclose the agreements signed with the pharmaceutical companies, and the Liberal government is governing by the seat of its pants, with no plan and no expertise.
The vaccination plan is chaotic at best. We still have a lot of questions to ask to find out what went wrong.
Many of our allies have vaccinated a considerable portion of their population, while we are still in lockdown and worrying about the spread of new COVID-19 variants.
Again today, during question period, the Prime Minister gave us the same empty rhetoric we have been hearing for weeks now. He said that Canada has acquired more vaccine doses per person than any other country, that we will have more doses than anyone else, but we do not know when we will get them. There was not much point in signing so many vaccine agreements if we are going to be the last to get the vaccines. Canada did not receive any vaccines this week. None.
While the Liberals were wasting precious time, thousands of Canadians lost their lives to COVID-19. Businesses had to close their doors. Canadians had to deal with the consequences of the lockdown. How many people got COVID-19 this week? How many of them will die because the government failed to provide the provinces with vaccines? Seniors are the most vulnerable. They deserve better.
Today we are debating Bill C-14, legislation that delivers on promises made in the fall economic statement. That economic statement included some important measures, such as measures for Canadian families, that the Liberals opted not to implement before the holidays. The main reason they held off is that the Liberal government and the Prime Minister are in election strategy mode.
It is obvious that the Prime Minister does not like Parliament. It is even more obvious that he does not like consulting opposition parties about anything and that what he wants most of all is an election. When he had a majority, he could make all kinds of mistakes with impunity. Now he has to contend with opposition parties whose members are not as docile as those of his own party, and his convoluted explanations for those gaffes are falling on less forgiving ears.
A recent example is the fiasco of the appointment of the former Governor General. Today I called for the Prime Minister to accept responsibility. Employees who quit their job are not entitled to employment insurance. That applies to all workers except for the former Governor General, who was hand-picked by the Prime Minister. Friends of the Prime Minister who leave their job get a gold-plated pension. The former Governor General will get $150,000 a year for life and a similar expense budget, and this is all despite the revelations in the much-anticipated report. It has not yet been made public. It will be released at the pleasure of the President of the Privy Council, who will decide what will be published in the report and when. It is a much-anticipated report.
In the meantime, we are victims of a totally unacceptable fiasco with this minority government. This is truly wilful blindness on the part of the Prime Minister and his cabinet. They had to have turned a blind eye when they proceeded with this appointment, otherwise they would have known what happened. The Conservatives put an excellent viceregal appointment process in place to avoid this kind of fiasco. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister decided to disregard it. That was his choice. What the Prime Minister wanted took precedence over the health and future of Canadians. What Canadians want is to get out of this pandemic. They want to be healthy and go back to seeing their friends. They want lockdown to end and to get the vaccine the Prime Minister promised to provide them. They want a real economic recovery. There is nothing about any of that in Bill C-14.
Last fall, the Prime Minister and the Liberals missed a golden opportunity to use the economic statement to present a plan to return to normal. Millions of Canadians were abandoned during the pandemic because of the Prime Minister's incompetence. He put our workers and our economy at risk because of his failures on the vaccine front. There is only one way for us to protect our future. Under the leadership of the hon. member for Durham, the Conservatives will be able to ensure the safety of Canadians.
Unfortunately, what the Liberal government has taught us is that it is possible to spend billions of dollars and still leave behind millions of Canadians. As the Minister of Finance has confirmed, we are on track to having a historic deficit of almost $400 billion. The economic update clearly indicates that the Liberals still have no plan to help the millions of Canadians looking for work or the tens of thousands of businesses hit hard by the pandemic.