Madam Speaker, I appreciate the Speaker's Ruling earlier today that allows me to bring to the floor of this place an urgent matter. It is an emergency that is on the minds and hearts of every single Canadian.
I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith, my colleague and friend. I remember we were still sitting in the House together when he was the first member of Parliament to suggest that people ought to be wearing masks, drawing on the experience of what was working in other countries.
When we were all together until Friday, March 13 of last year, I would not have imagined that I would be speaking in the House virtually tonight during the third wave of COVID. We are speaking of things like variants of concern. We are no longer dealing with COVID-19 alone. We are dealing, as we know now, with variants of concern emerging from other countries. We have had them from South Africa, B.1.1.7 from the U.K. and P.1 from Brazil. There will be more.
We are learning as we go that the longer the pandemic stalks us as a human population, the longer we will be susceptible as the virus mutates into new forms and variants. We now know some of these variants are far more transmissible than COVID-19. Can members imagine that we could be nostalgic about an earlier form of COVID-19? I would not have imagined it.
The “wash your hands, do not touch your face” rules do not seem to apply with variants that appear to be transmitted far more easily, including as aerosols.
I realize that I failed to turn on my interpretation device. That is not helping our interpreters. I am sorry.
The situation we are now in requires us to do something different. It is frequently described as a race between the vaccines and the variants, but I do not think even this particular description serves us well because we are a fragmented federation with far too many tendencies to blame somebody for the situation in which we find ourselves.
I gravely fear that partisanship and federal-provincial tensions will make matters worse. We need to figure out how to offer our constituents solutions they want, and not cast blame upon one another. None of us in this place is an expert on pandemics, except potentially one. There is a scientist among us who is a medical geographer and studied the Spanish flu outbreak: the member for Etobicoke North.
However, this is a place full of people who have been elected to serve the public of this country, and we have to be of service. At this time, I think that means blowing the whistle on saying that what we are doing now is not working.
In Mark Carney's new book, Values: Building a Better World for All, he discusses many things. One of them is COVID-19 and the different responses to it from governments around the world. The terminology he uses is very apt and understandable. He says that some governments used the hammer and others chose the dance. Can members guess which one we are?
It reminds me of World Health Organization officer Mike Ryan who, more than a year ago, said that it was time we recognized that we have to be fast and not wait to be correct. It was important to have no regrets and just move.
We are still in the dance. I do not blame any politician or party for this. A lot of it is cultural. A lot of it is relying on a fragmented federation, and no one wanting to step on anybody else's toes. The dance is not working.
A very important point comes from Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, an expert in complex systems. He is at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He said:
Vaccinations shouldn’t be expected to be a get-out-of-jail-free card in ending the pandemic.
If we are in a debate and one group of people wants to blame the federal government for not buying enough vaccines because vaccines are a way out, it is important to keep vaccines in perspective. They are not our get-out-of-jail-free card. More must be done, and that often falls under provincial jurisdiction.
Why are we not learning the lessons from what worked and did not work in the first and second waves? Can we not successfully share that some provinces and territories have been spectacular in going to zero COVID? Can the rest of us not learn from that? Can we not ask our institutions and public health experts to say that bending the curve is not the thing, that they thought it was the thing and we do not blame them for thinking it was the thing, but now we have to go to zero COVID. If we are bending and flattening the curve, we are allowing COVID to last among us longer. We will have more variants because we will have more mutations because that is what viruses do.
There are many examples around the world. Some were able to go to zero COVID fast because the public in those countries was used to being bossed around. That is a theory that we read in many of the articles and journals that are fashionable now. What do we do with a society like Canada that has a population that is used to having its liberties and is not good at being told where people can and cannot go? I contrast that with Australia. I think Australia is our best example. It is also a federation. It also has a federal government and eight states that have their own rules and jurisdictions.
What Australia did at the beginning was figure out that it needed a new structure. I think Canada needs new structures. Australia decided to put together two different committees. One was chaired by its equivalent of Dr. Theresa Tam with all the people around the table. Whether the equivalent of Rob Strang from Nova Scotia or Bonnie Henry from British Columbia, they sat at the same table and tried to figure out what they were going to do based on the best science. Our approach has been a bit more chaotic, a bit more differentiated and we do not have a single structure that says how we learn, who is doing it right and who is getting the best results.
Can we not ask our public health experts now to please work together and inform politicians at all orders of government what going to zero looks like for Canada? We should not be second-guessing Canadians' attitudes and saying we cannot tell people to stay home because they are sick of it. If our public believes, if our citizenry accepts that we actually have a formula that works based on experiences elsewhere and that if we do it hard, we get it right, we go to zero, then we can be like New Zealand and Australia and be greeting our families with open arms in the airports that just opened.
Right now, I think we need to stop more of the flights coming in from other countries. We do not want people flying in from India, bringing new variants, bringing new disease. We do not even want interprovincial transport. Newfoundland and Labrador was really doing well in the Atlantic bubble until workers flying in from their jobs in Alberta brought COVID into the communities. We have to be serious about locking down and going to zero.
Lastly, I want to read from an article and I want to credit journalist Andrew Nikiforuk for his 2008 book on pandemics called Pandemonium. It gave him a lot of knowledge as a journalist, which he has been sharing. If we had followed the advice he gave in a January article in The Tyee, COVID could be over in Canada by now. I want to read from his most recent article, which states:
Get on with it.
Canada needs to put this pandemic behind us.
To do that we need a more aggressive and proactive public health approach, with intensive testing...and better targeted, quicker and stricter lockdowns. We need to do what it takes to get to zero to protect the greater public health. And the sooner we do that, the healthier our nation will be.
I talk to parents throughout my riding and all over Canada who do not want to send their kids to school because they are not masked. They wonder why it is that teachers are not being vaccinated up front. They want to know why different provinces have different rules. They want to know how come Nova Scotia was so smart. They want to know why our governments made mistakes. However, it is not with a spirit of blame. We must not blame, particularly individual politicians. Everyone is doing their best. Let us just take that as written. Everyone is doing their best, but collectively, as a country, we are not doing what Canadians want and what Canadians deserve.
I ask all of my colleagues tonight in this debate to please set aside blame and finger pointing, think about what our constituents want of us and is it not time to say that we should learn from what Canadian provinces and territories succeeded, apply that to where we are not doing so well and, with no blame and no shame, form a new committee, as Green Party leader Annamie Paul has been calling for consistently, an interprovincial task force that decides as a country what we do to get through this together.