Madam Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to stand in the House, representing the people of Timmins—James Bay, and to be here in the House tonight as we, from all parties, attempt to pass legislation on what is coming close to the second anniversary of the pandemic.
If someone had said to me in March 2020 that we would be in the House debating the need to get 10 days of paid sick leave or to have laws in place to stop the harassment and threats of medical professionals by people who are our neighbours, I would have said it was simply impossible.
COVID has taught us, and COVID is a very hard teacher, but it has been clear from the get-go that it is something bigger than anything that was within our human imagination. Our generation has never seen anything like this. Throughout COVID, I find myself going back to Albert Camus's The Plague. I have been reading it and rereading it. He wrote:
Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves.
He went on:
They disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is people who pass away, [especially those who] haven’t taken their precautions.
When we are talking about the need to have 10 days of paid sick leave two years into a pandemic, I feel like we have found ourselves in some kind of dark, dystopian Groundhog Day, that what we are repeating again and again are the same mistakes, and we are still having difficulty learning the lessons of a pandemic. The pandemic does not care whether we believe in it or not; the pandemic does not care if it is fair, and the pandemic certainly does not care about the short-term goals of various political leaders like Jason Kenney, who decided to announce that last summer was going to be the greatest summer ever, because he was simply going to ignore health protocols in order to make his party look good. He plunged Alberta into medical chaos and caused the deaths of too many innocent people.
I think of Doug Ford. As people were dying in warehouses in Peel, Brampton and the 401 and 905 areas, he was not willing to put paid sick leave in. In fact, he recently said he believed that come January there would be no need for vaccine mandates. This is a man who is still refusing to learn lessons.
We know here of the culpability of the Canadian government in fighting at the WTO against the right of the global south to create vaccines. Did anyone think that omicron would not happen, and that we would allow ourselves first-wave and second-wave boosters and protect ourselves but not ensure adequate vaccination in other parts of the globe, and that somehow the pandemic would not go there and come back? Now we are dealing with omicron.
Camus says that we have learned that the pandemic has made us all share the same collective fate. It is a hard lesson we are learning.
I remember how everyone rose up in the first wave and how hopeful it was. People took up hobbies and people were going to get themselves physically fit. Camus said, “At first, the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration.”
I think, in the isolation and difficulties, the vast majority of people carried on. This morning, when I walked through the snowstorms in Ottawa, I saw almost every single person wearing a mask. The vast majority of people have taken up what they know is going to be a difficult and maybe long-term issue. Sure, they complain. They have a right to complain, but they carry on.
In the first and second waves, people phoned our offices daily. We tried to help, we tried to give them answers and we tried to keep businesses going. Those people had legitimate fears, fears about the future of their business, fears about health care, fears about all the disinformation and falsehoods. They were all legitimate questions because we were dealing with something bigger than ourselves.
I found by the fourth wave that things had shifted to a sullen tiredness in the vast majority of people. However, a small minority of people had gone to a different place, a kind of radicalized sense of self-isolation and self-entitlement, a belief that somehow the government, the medical institutions and their neighbours were all against their right to go and do what they had always wanted to do. They were not doing their share, so the rest of the population was doing it.
Then we started seeing these terrible images that compared the mass murder of the Jewish families in Ukraine with the fact that Buddy could not go to East Side Mario's because he refused to get a vaccine. Then they began to turn on front-line medical workers. I talked to paramedics who said to me, “What is it about us?” These paramedics were out in the middle of the night on the highways at accidents, or were helping during the opioid crises, or were on the front-lines at the hospitals. They wanted to know why they were being targeted. In my region, a doctor was harassed and gave up her practice.
There is something deeply wrong when we have to come here at this point. Finally, after two years, we recognize the fundamental medical principle that if people are feeling sick, they should not go to work. That is the most common-sense way to stop the spread, particularly now with omicron variant.
The fact that we need to have a law to protect workers from harassment is deeply concerning. We will stand up for the medical workers and we will bring that law in. However, in doing that, let us not forget and let us not diminish the fact that there is incredible fortitude among the Canadian people.
I was very disheartened to hear my Conservative colleague talk about how we had to accommodate people who denied science, people who denied the need to have a collective responsibility for their neighbours, as opposed to saying no, that we stand for the right of people to go to work and be safe, that when people go to work, school or the hospital, they can go home at the end of the day even in these hard and uncertain times because they know their government is taking every step possible. That is part of what we are here to do tonight.
We need to address the need to change the TRIPS waiver. Canada has to stop being a laggard on the international stage. It has to show leadership. We are, as Camus says, all collectively in the same boat when it comes to the pandemic.
I would like to end by quoting Camus again, because what isolation has taught me is the power of family, the power of community and certainly, for me, the power of live music, which I hope comes back. Camus writes about the people in the village and says, “They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.” He said that out of the plague that affected the people in his town, that he realized there was so much more to admire in people than to despise.
Finally, and I find this so powerful because I am so tired and disheartened and hurt by what COVID has done to the fabric of our communities and our sense of confidence and our ability to see each. Camus says, “What's true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well”, because it helps people “rise above themselves.”
We are in the fourth wave or the beginning of a fifth wave, I do not know how many waves, but we are not out of the COVID pandemic. It is with us now, but we do not have to give in to it. We do not have to give in to fear and we do not have to give in to stupidity. There are smart ways. It is the only way we can take on COVID and restore that sense of human community and the bond that keeps us together.
I urge my colleagues to support the legislation.
