Mr. Speaker, I apologize.
The Prime Minister said that this was because Canada no longer had any domestic production capacity for vaccines. Seven months prior, in May, the government announced tens of millions of dollars to increase domestic production capacity and said that two Canadian production facilities would have the capacity to produce 70,000 to 100,000 doses per month by summer 2020, with an even greater production capacity in the months to follow. In August, the government said that Canada would be able to make 250,000 vaccine doses by November. We know now that this did not happen.
The reality now is that Canada is behind the U.S., the U.K., the European Union, Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia for vaccine procurement. There are over 2.7 billion people, or one-third of the population of the planet, ahead of Canada for a vaccine. Where is the Prime Minister's plan?
What we have learned from the Liberal government is that it is entirely possible to spend billions of dollars and still leave millions of Canadians behind. Canada's unemployment rate is currently at 8.5%. This is among the highest in the G7, despite Canada spending more than any other country in the OECD. As of January 21, according to Statistics Canada, Canada now has 858,000 fewer jobs than it did in February of last year, before COVID-19 began.
Canada has now gone 460 days without a federal budget, and the Prime Minister has indicated struggling Canadians should not expect one any time soon. If the government has failed the airline sector, if the government has failed Canadian workers and if the government has failed during the pandemic, how can we possibly count on it to lead us out of the pandemic and save our economy?