Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I just want to take a moment to thank the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands for requesting this emergency debate tonight. This is a great opportunity to highlight some of the serious concerns that I have with the Liberal government's response to the pandemic, but also to offer some recommendations.
We are well over a year into this crisis and the fact remains that we are in worse shape now than at any other point during the pandemic. People continue to die and health care staff are kind of burned out. Hospitals and ICUs are struggling. Variants are spreading. Millions of students are not in their classrooms. Countless business are shut down, workers are without pay cheques and we have a vaccine shortage that is prolonging the pandemic.
Throughout it all, we have witnessed a government struggling to meet these challenges head-on. While no one expected a flawless response, time and time again it has dropped the ball. I have yet to hear the Prime Minister, or any minister for that matter, acknowledge the multiple mistakes that have been made. I do not say this lightly, but the Liberal government has failed; failed to ensure that we had an emergency stockpile of PPE, failed to safely reunite families and failed to secure enough vaccines to arrive in Canada for the first half of 2021. Regardless of however the Liberals want to spin it, the virus is winning. Until there is an acknowledgement that mistakes are made, we are left scratching our heads if they truly understand the implications of their decisions or, in some cases, their lack of action.
Tonight, I will share three specific recommendations that I want to see the government act upon.
The first is to abide by the motion that was passed at the health committee that ordered the government to allow the committee to review the vaccine contracts at an in camera meeting. My colleague from Foothills referred to this earlier. We are aware of the confidentiality clauses contained in those contracts, which is exactly why we proposed they be shared at an in camera meeting.
I want everyone to step back for a moment and think about how ridiculous the government's position is. The government sought parliamentary approval to purchase those vaccines, but does not want parliamentarians to know what was contained in the contracts. How can we do our job as the official opposition if we are being completely left in the dark? How do we know if the Liberals signed good deals? The answer is that we do not know. From my vantage point, we have a massive vaccine shortage and every day we find out that more shipments are being delayed. Without Pfizer and now the Biden administration, we would be even further behind. We cannot measure vaccine successes by the size of Canada's vaccine portfolio. We measure success by getting vaccines delivered to the provinces and into people's arms. There is no other matrix that could possibly be used to evaluate the government's record on procuring vaccines.
The provinces need the vaccines now, not five months from now. The only information in the contracts that I know to be true is that the government paid double for the AstraZeneca vaccine compared to some other nations; at least double in most cases. The only reason we know that little bit of information is because it was contained in an email from the Prime Minister's Office in his communications shop. The provinces cannot wait any longer. Just this week, it was announced that the premier of Ontario was calling international allies to see if they can send more vaccines to his province. The Government of Manitoba has already signed a contract with one of the Canadian pharmaceutical companies and they just announced a deal with North Dakota to get our truck drivers vaccinated. I applaud those actions as it is clear that they cannot wait for the Liberal vaccine portfolio to be delivered sometime down the road.
The second recommendation is to fix the mail-in process of PCR tests for returning Canadians who live in rural areas. In the last month alone, my office has been contacted by multiple families about how the government has signed a deal with Purolator and how it is next to impossible to mail back the PCR tests. I want the Liberal MPs in the House to know how stressful this is on families, so I will share the contents of an email I received yesterday.
The mother of a son who recently returned from university called PHAC to arrange for a pick-up of the PCR test and was told only Purolator is handling the packages. She then called Purolator and it told her it does not visit the rural community on weekends. After being on the phone for an hour she finally spoke to someone who was supposed to swing by their farm to pick up the package on Monday. They waited on Monday and no one came to pick it up. She then waited on hold for another hour and was told there was no guarantee the PCR test could be picked up. Purolator then told her to drive into town to drop off the package on Tuesday afternoon and to leave it outside at the agreed upon location. By the time the PCR kit was sent in, it begs the question whether it would still be accurate. Because the PCR test was left outside, would it make the result unreliable? I really do not know. What I do know is that this is happening across rural Canada. She mentioned that her son would have been willing to drive to Brandon to get the test done in person, which is about 90 miles, rather than try to navigate through this convoluted process. Here is the kicker. Because her son had been in the United States, he was fully vaccinated. He received both doses. These are not my words, but she closed out her email to me by saying that this whole thing “stinks”.
Once again, the government has implemented a plan that sounds good, but in practice is not working. Surely, if people can get their online parcels delivered to far-flung places, the federal government could partner with parcel delivery companies to get PCR tests picked up.
My last recommendation is to distribute and encourage the use of rapid tests. It was disappointing to see the government disregard the Calgary airport testing pilot program, which completely took it off guard.
We have also seen the Minister of Health question the validity of rapid tests, even after spending millions of taxpayer dollars to purchase them.
It must also be said that the government paid a company for rapid test kits without even seeing if they would pass Health Canada's standards. They were then found to be faulty.
Putting all that aside, I know there is a willingness from the government to get more rapid test kits handed out to Canadians as Industry Canada announced it is “launching new efforts to increase the availability” of rapid tests. Multiple provinces are now using rapid tests to help with their screening efforts and it is paying off. Part of the challenge with COVID-19 is that not everyone has symptoms but can be a carrier of the virus and potentially expose others. With the use of rapid test kits, schools and businesses have been able to stop outbreaks before they happen. In the U.K., nine in 10 pharmacies are offering free rapid test kits and are now offering every citizen in the U.K. twice weekly rapid test kits. I want to see this success be replicated in every community across this country. As the adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
These are three recommendations the government can easily adopt and build on.
My heart goes out to all those who have lost loved ones and to those who are now on the brink of bankruptcy.
I also want to add my heartfelt thanks to all of our frontline service personnel who have worked tirelessly to try to bring this pandemic under control as much as they possibly can.
I also want the government to succeed in ending the pandemic. I know the government can and must do better, so I urge all members, including Liberal MPs, to join us in pushing their ministers to act swiftly. This is not the time for excuses. People are counting on all of us to get this right.