Madam Speaker, as the member of Parliament for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, home to Canada's largest army base, it is my privilege to represent the women and men of Garrison Petawawa. My question to the Prime Minister was about providing protection from COVID-19 for soldiers being deployed overseas on Operation Reassurance. I ask the same question for soldiers deployed outside Canada on operations Impact, Naberius, Snowgoose, Driftnet, Soprano, Projection, Presence, Unifier, Jade, Proteus, Calumet, Kobold, and Neon.
Since the start of the COVID pandemic, almost 1,300 members of Canada's armed forces have contracted the virus, an infection rate that is almost double the rate among all Canadians. Soldiers are at higher risk.
The decision to deploy soldiers overseas without being vaccinated first is another bad decision by a Prime Minister with an abysmal record of making bad decisions when it comes to Canada's military. This vaccine policy failure of the Prime Minister and his government is similar to his failure to deal with sexual harassment in the military. That failure can be traced to his treatment of women, like the reporter he groped.
The subsequent order from the Prime Minister to scavenge a vaccine from the country where the soldiers are being sent is beyond outrageous. Many, if not most, of the countries where Canadian soldiers are deployed will try to obtain doses of a COVID-19 vaccine from COVAX. COVAX is the global vaccine-sharing initiative jointly coordinated by the World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance. Without COVAX, many of the world's poorest countries would have no vaccines at all. If the world is expected to get a handle on COVID, it will depend on a global effort to vaccinate as many willing citizens as possible.
Canadians are embarrassed by the Prime Minister's decision to access vaccines from a program primarily designed to help developing countries. Forcing deployed military members to source medical vaccines from the local supply puts soldiers and their families at unnecessary risk.
The situation faced by our deployed soldiers was brought to my attention by the families of serving soldiers. The following letter was written to the Minister of Defence: “To whom it may concern, I thank you for your response, although, since it has taken more than two months to respond, the situation has drastically changed. Since writing to you with my concerns, my partner has spent more than half his deployment in some form of isolation as a precaution, close contact and finally, after he contracted COVID-19, along with many other CF personnel, sent to communal living during an outbreak. Your response was also not helpful in that it's a carbon copy of the information published months ago by the Department of National Defence and disseminated publicly. I am an intelligent person who can read the news. My issue is not one of being uninformed, but of bringing attention to a policy that puts our—