Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands for requesting this very important debate this evening.
I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Jonquière. He will talk a little more about vaccine procurement and how the federal and provincial governments are coordinating vaccinations.
I would like to talk about the federal government's management of the border since the beginning of the pandemic. I have already said this in the House, but I think it is worth repeating. Some of my colleagues may see where I am going with this or may have read the same book I did. I am talking about the book that political commentator Alec Castonguay recently wrote about the pandemic in Quebec and across Canada. He interviewed Quebec and Canadian government officials, health care workers and political staffers to learn how the pandemic was managed, especially in the early days of the crisis.
Alec Castonguay reports a number of interesting facts, including about the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, a unit of the Public Health Agency of Canada that was set up in the 1990s in the wake of the SARS crisis. GPHIN acted as an early warning system, like a smoke detector for new viruses around the world. Over the years, GPHIN had become the main early warning system for emerging infectious diseases for 85 countries. Normally, the World Health Organization, the WHO, relies on GPHIN for approximately 20% of its reports of new viruses in the world every year, which is quite a lot.
Apparently, however, GPHIN was caught off guard by the emergence of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, China. Actually, I believe it saw the virus coming, but it was unable to issue an early warning like it used to. GPHIN scientists stopped issuing warnings in May 2019, six or seven months before the virus was detected in China.
According to Mr. Castonguay's book, the reason is that Stephen Harper's Conservative government cut funding to GPHIN because it did not think it was important, or did not realize how important it was. The scientists were reassigned, and the situation did not improve when the Liberals took office in 2015, since they did not inject any more money into GPHIN.
That shows just how ill-prepared the federal government was to deal with this crisis, how it did not see the crisis coming at all and how it could have been so much better prepared. I think this is a perfect example of the lack of co-operation with other governments around the world. There was a lack of coordination from the start, and I think the recent budget that was presented this week is also proof of that.
We see how paternalistic the federal government is being with the provinces by trying to leave them no choice but to be constantly begging for money. The federal government goes and infringes on the jurisdictions of the provinces and Quebec, and the sheer paternalism is completely staggering. I think that is the reason for the lack of co-operation among the various levels of government.
I want to take a look back at the government's management of the border. Members will recall that the WHO declared a global health emergency on January 30, 2020. However, in February 2020, Canadians continued to return to Canada from China and other places around the world and started bringing the virus to Canada. Many international experts and specialists were saying that countries needed to start testing travellers or at least screening them, but that was not always done.
The Public Health Agency of Canada maintained its alert level at “low risk” within Canada. An alert was issued for people returning from China, but nothing more. Then, on March 11, the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, to alert governments, but this had no impact in Canada. On March 16, the Government of Quebec and the City of Montreal decided to take action at Montreal's Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport because no one was asking returning passengers any questions, screening people or taking temperature readings. Travellers were not being instructed to self-isolate, either.
In March 2020, the Bloc Québécois proposed 22 measures to the federal government, particularly on managing the borders in order to bring in somewhat tighter controls. I seem to recall that the Government of Quebec and Premier François Legault had asked for the same thing, specifically, that the federal government screen travellers more proactively. However, it was not until this March that the federal government finally imposed the mandatory quarantine, which I would say was too little, too late.
Between March 1 and March 21, 42,000 foreign travellers and nearly 250,000 Canadians arrived at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport in Montreal from all around the world, including COVID-19 hot spots. By land, nearly 157,000 Quebeckers returned home and nearly 37,000 Americans also crossed the border from neighbouring states. At the beginning of the crisis, during that first wave, 250 different strains of the virus ended up in Quebec alone.
Let us move on to the second wave and the arrival of the variants. We all remember the episode with the U.K. variant before the holidays. People were calling for tighter measures at land and air ports of entry because we all remember that people were fed up with the pandemic and they wanted to spend their Christmas holidays down south. It was not the best idea, but the federal government did not stop people from leaving. People asked the government to at least ban entry from the U.K., which it did a few days later, fortunately. However, the variant was already taking hold across Canada and in Quebec. Again, it was too little, too late.
Then the same thing happened again. In January 2021, François Legault once again called for tighter border restrictions. The federal government claimed to have the strictest measures in the world, but people realized that the federal and provincial governments were all passing the buck. Nobody knew who was supposed to monitor quarantines, the police or the Public Health Agency of Canada. As we know, people returning from abroad were getting either a text message or a phone call to make sure they were at home and quarantining as ordered. Basically, it was a total fiasco.
On January 29, the Prime Minister of Canada finally confirmed that he would be implementing new measures, but they did not come into effect until a month later, on February 22. That was the infamous mandatory hotel quarantine, whose implementation was a total farce. Still, I think that measure is important, and I want to stress that. Nevertheless, the fact that variants continue to show up here, especially the Indian and Brazilian variants, proves that the existing measures are clearly not enough to keep the pandemic under control or at least that they are not being implemented properly.
I do not have to tell members just how critical the situation is in every province at this time. We learned earlier today that there are now 27 cases of the Indian variant in Canada, including one in Quebec. We heard Quebec's health minister say that this variant is more worrisome than the others because public health authorities are concerned that it is more resistant to the available vaccines. This calls into question the whole vaccination program, which was the light at the end of the tunnel. We figured that, when everyone was vaccinated and when all Canadians were immunized, we could put all of this behind us once and for all. However, it is very worrisome to see that variants can enter the country and change the situation.
What is encouraging is that we can take action to prevent this. What we need to do is tighten border restrictions because the variants and the virus did not magically arrive in Canada.