Debates of April 29th, 2021

Opposition Motion—Access to COVID-19 vaccines

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, hopefully in the future my colleague and I will be able to sit on that patio together and talk about some of these issues in a face-to-face manner.

I want to touch upon the member's discussion about vaccine production and the ability for us to have domestic production. Her and other colleagues have noted that this is not just a Liberal issue. This happened under the Conservatives and the Liberals. We have lost our ability to have national vaccine production. We know this is probably not going to be the last pandemic.

What would she propose we do to build up our national vaccine production so we are not stuck in this situation when future pandemics occur?

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, vaccine manufacturing is not the only failure on the pharmaceutical side.

I am not a big fan of pharma companies, but I recognize that there are often 10, 15 or 20 years of research in all areas before a vaccine or a drug goes to market.

We must put in place a research and development system that is horizontal and not vertical, or a silo. It is impossible for one company to do everything. It is not cost-effective.

We also have to look at reforms. Will they truly benefit us or will we continue to be dependent on others?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

I would just interrupt the hon. member there. He might have been about to explain something about his headset. I do notice that it is not one that was authorized by the House. Does he have a comment on that?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I do indeed, Mr. Speaker. You anticipated where I was going. Unfortunately, my Surface Pro is acting up and I cannot connect. The only way I can connect to give my speech is through my phone, and this is the only microphone I have.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

I thank the hon. member. At this point, it does look like we are getting sufficient quality of sound since interpretation, which is our biggest concern, matters. It is acceptable, so we will go ahead with the hon. member for Vancouver Kingsway. I appreciate his efforts to get through these kinds of technical challenges.

The hon. member for Vancouver Kingsway.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my hon colleague, the member for Timmins—James Bay.

Former NDP leader Jack Layton left a big mark in the House and also in the country. One of his famous phrases, which I have taken to heart, was that it was part of an opposition's job not just to oppose but to propose.

From the outset, the New Democratic caucus, led by our leader, has taken that to heart, and we have worked very hard and diligently to not only hold the government accountable, but also to provide positive constructive policies that will help Canadians in this great time of need.

Of course, I think it goes without saying that Canadians have not faced such serious economic and health challenges and dangers in very many decades. Our number one goal, as the New Democratic caucus, has always been to place the needs of Canadians first to ensure they have the economic and health supports they need to get them through what is a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

I will itemize some of the accomplishments we have achieved in this regard.

We are responsible for over 15 separate improvements to the economic supports Canadians have obtained through this crisis, whether it is the $2,000 CERB, ensuring it was extended when needed; or ensuring small businesses had their wage subsidy go from the original 10% to 75%; or proposing paid sick days and leading the charge for those days. It was the New Democrats who put that on the national agenda. We have proposed national standards for long-term care to address what all Canadians realize is a shameful letdown of the seniors who built our country.

We were the first party to raise the efficacy of masks. We were the first party to raise the issue of community and asymptomatic transmission at the health committee. We were the first party to have proposed, concretely, a real measure that would address Canada's shameful inability to have domestic vaccine production in our own country by proposing a public drug manufacturer through a Crown corporation modelled on the very successful Connaught Laboratories experiment our country pioneered. We have called for stronger border controls. Now we are advocating a zero-COVID strategy.

Also, equally our responsibility is to hold the government accountable. That is an important role of an opposition party in our democratic system and, frankly, there is much to critique. There have been years of neglect by governments to ensure that Canada is emergency prepared. The classic example of this is a very short-sighted decision in 2018 to weaken Canada's global public health information network, which was Canada's nerve centre, its eyes and ears on the world to keep Canadians alerted, at the earliest point possible, to outbreaks of disease. That was seriously weakened by the Liberal government.

The government minimized the risk of COVID-19 at the very beginning, and this had a colossal consequence of losing precious time at the beginning of this pandemic. The government was slow to close borders. In fact, the current Minister of Health said that to do so would be harmful. That was the position of the Minister of Health back in the spring of 2020.

Of course, I have mentioned that we have no domestic vaccine production manufacturing capacity. This is the result of decades of poor pharmaceutical policy decisions by successive Liberal and Conservative governments. A G7 country like Canada should never have left Canadians in the position where we were vulnerable to multinational corporations or foreign governments for vaccines and essential medicines.

The current government, frankly, bungled the opportunity to manufacture AstraZeneca in our country, which was offered by AstraZeneca to any country that wanted to do so and which some 15 other countries took up the offer to do that, including countries like Mexico and Argentina.

The government refused to use its full powers as a federal government and still refuses to do so to this day, content to let provinces struggle and in some cases get seriously overwhelmed for political reasons.

Despite its spin and rhetoric, the government has failed to procure vaccines as quickly or as effectively as it could have. Frankly, that is not a question of political opinion, the numbers bear that out. As we sit approaching May 2021, only 2.8% of Canadians are fully vaccinated and 27.8% of Canadians, fewer than one-third, have received one jab. This puts us 33rd globally for doses per 100 people. By the way, I know that the government is fond of saying that we are third in the OECD for administering vaccines, but what it does not say is that we are 33rd globally. We are 74th in the world for the percentage of population fully vaccinated.

The result of this, of course, is that provinces across this country have been forced to ration doses. Let us be honest. This is the only reason that we are stretching second jabs of vaccines to four months over the objections of the manufacturers themselves, which had their drugs clinically approved based on jabs three weeks apart.

Globally, Canada's reputation has been damaged. We all know that the COVAX system in our world is meant for one overarching objective and that is to ensure that poor and developing countries have access to vaccines. However, the government has put in an order for 1.8 million doses from AstraZeneca, which we have not received yet. This move is entirely perplexing, given that the Prime Minister has repeatedly said to Canadians that we have sufficient doses from Pfizer and Moderna alone to vaccinate every single Canadian.

I want to pause for a moment and mention what is being noticed by world leaders. The Director-General of the World Health Organization said this:

I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of catastrophic moral failure—and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world's poorest countries. Not only does this me-first approach leave the world's poorest and most vulnerable people at risk, it's also self-defeating. Ultimately, these actions will only prolong the pandemic [prolong our pain], the restrictions needed to contain it, and human and economic suffering.

The Secretary-General of the OECD said this:

The global economy stands to lose as much as $9.2 trillion if governments fail to ensure developing countries access to COVID-19 vaccines, as much as half of which would fall on advanced economies.

Finally, Oxfam Canada said this:

Canada should not be taking the COVAX vaccine from poor nations to alleviate political pressures at home. Receiving one or two million doses isn't going to solve Canada's vaccination challenges and it is going to cause harm elsewhere in the world for the poorest and most marginalized people.

We see what is happening in India today, a global hot spot that affects us here at home in Canada because we have to put in travel bans. They cannot even vaccinate their own people and yet we want to draw vaccines from them.

I support every word of the preamble of this motion, but I cannot support the motion because it plays politics. It calls for the government to vaccinate every adult Canadian by the May long weekend. We have vaccinated approximately 12 million Canadians. There are about 30 million Canadian adults. That means we need another 18 million doses to meet the objective of this motion. That means we would have to vaccinate six million Canadians every week for the next three weeks. Canada's capacity is 3.1 million doses per week.

The motion would call on us to vaccinate at twice the capacity that we have in this country. In addition, we are receiving between two million and three million doses per week, God willing. That means that we would have to procure two to three times the vaccine doses. Where do those doses come from?

We would love to be able to vaccinate every Canadian by this Sunday. That is not realistic. Instead of playing politics and putting forth completely unrealistic and unreasonable motions like this, the NDP will continue to fight for practical, pragmatic, concrete and positive proposals that can be implemented, that will keep Canadians safe and will position our country to deal with the next national emergency, so we are never again placed in such a vulnerable position as successive Conservative and Liberal governments have left us.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have a list of names of countries I want to read and I am hoping the member from the NDP might guess what they have in common. I will start at the top of the list: Seychelles, Israel, Chile, Bahrain, Monaco, United States, San Marino, Malta, U.K., Serbia, Maldives, Uruguay, Singapore, Morocco, Switzerland, Denmark, Turkey, Liechtenstein, Romania, Czech Republic, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Austria, Spain, France, Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece, Mongolia, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Andorra, Brazil, Norway, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Mexico, Panama, Croatia, Montenegro, Colombia and Finland. I will give a hint—

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We do have other question to get to. The hon. member gets the general picture. We will let him give his response.

The hon. member for Vancouver Kingsway.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my educated guess would be that those are all countries that have vaccinated higher percentages of their populations than Canada has. He is quite right. That points out that despite the rhetoric of the Liberal government, it has not done a good job procuring vaccines and it has, frankly, failed the provinces and Canadians in doing so.

If I can get back to this motion, that will not be repaired or addressed by putting forward fanciful, completely unrealistic and unobtainable targets of vaccination. My hon. colleague would do better to support the NDP's call for the support of a Crown corporation to manufacture vaccines in this country. Then we would be world leaders next time a pandemic occurs in this country.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech and for his involvement in this issue.

Since this is a global crisis and we will not be safe until all other countries are safe, does the member think that, under these circumstances, the intellectual property rules could be waived so that the vaccines could be considered a global public good?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that question gives me a chance to talk about Canada's completely unexplainable and, frankly, shameful position taken at the WTO where countries are asking for the World Trade Organization to temporarily relax intellectual property rules so that countries could be free to have access to the technology and intellectual property to manufacture vaccines on their own and Canada is not supporting that measure.

This is a global pandemic. We all have an interest in making sure that every human gets access to a vaccine. It is in our self-interest, as well as for social justice reasons. More importantly, most money that went into developing vaccines was done with public money. This is not a case where drug companies invested their own capital, did their own risk and ought to have had a good case for reward. This is the case of public money going into research and these vaccines should be unleashed so that every country can be producing vaccines, if they can, without restrictions.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the motion says that the government is going against the recommendations of vaccine manufacturers by extending the recommended interval for the second dose to four months. I am sure that the manufacturers' recommendations are important, but this motion portrays those recommendations as gospel.

Public health authorities said that the second dose can be administered up to four months after the first. Why does the motion ignore this public health recommendation as though it were simply not scientifically valid?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that gives me a chance to talk about the approach of the government. It is fair to say that the government has been incredibly secretive and has exhibited an unacceptable lack of transparency in the way it communicates. For instance, it refused to reveal a single word of a single paragraph of a single contract it has signed with vaccine manufacturers, despite the fact that other countries are doing so. The U.S. has revealed every vaccine contract, albeit redacted to some degree, as have the EU and other countries.

Secrecy and lack of transparency are not the way to build confidence in the public. We need the advice of organizations like NACI in order to make intelligent, research and science-based decisions about vaccines in this country and we need the public to have confidence in that advice. I am going to again give the government a failing grade for its lack of transparency in dealing with this crisis.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay. People are very tired. People have come through really difficult times and this third wave is hitting us the hardest of all. People's emotions are stretched, and small businesses are hanging by a thread. We should never have been in this situation where these new variants are causing such havoc, destruction and heartache.

The people of Canada have inspired me so incredibly with their determination and stepping up. People are carrying heavy loads and are not giving in to conspiracy; that is a small, small margin. The average person is doing their part, but COVID is a very hard teacher. COVID is teaching us just how unequal our society is and exposing the hypocrisy of governments that are refusing to step up and show leadership. If we are frustrated at anything, it is the complete lack of a national vision and an international vision to respond to a pandemic that is worse than anything we could have ever imagined.

In this motion today, the Leader of the Opposition has decided he is going to demand that we have everyone vaccinated by the May long weekend, when the Conservatives know it is not possible. What are they doing here? They want a gotcha moment. We do not gotcha moments, and Canadians do not need gotcha moments. We need a plan.

However, we do not see a plan from the Liberal government. At the beginning of the pandemic, our Prime Minister really rallied Canadians. It was going to be a team Canada approach. That is what people wanted. People were willing to do their part. Then Mr. Team Canada started missing game after game, shrugging it off, refusing to deal with the issue of the border closures and refusing to deal with the fact that we do not have vaccine capacity in Canada. While other countries were investing in vaccines, he believed that we could trust the international market and it would look after us. He is the last of the Davos believers, and we are suffering for it today.

When CERB ended, that is when the workers began to die. We pushed the government to put in place a national sick benefits program, which the Liberals laughed at but agreed to. However, it is cumbersome and difficult to use. There are workers and racialized workers dying in horrific numbers while we see the absolute negligence in Ontario of the Doug Ford government.

This is another failure of the Liberals. They do not mind that Doug Ford is looking like a complete buffoon in his negligence, and they are more than willing to say that it is a provincial jurisdiction. There is no national vision. There is no desire to stand up and fight and say that we need to work together.

The enormous capacity of the federal government to offer help and bring together an emergency plan, which the New Democrats asked for, could have addressed the crisis happening in places like Vaughan, Peel and Scarborough. To see hundreds and hundreds of people lining up in the cold to try to get a vaccine in Scarborough shocked me. I never thought I would see something like that in this country.

What we are learning now from the first wave of the pandemic is that 3,700 senior citizens died in long-term care homes in Ontario. The negligence and indifference to their suffering was known, it was documented, and nobody bothered to go in and enforce the rules, and people died. Finally the army had to go in, and it found senior citizens left in diapers. It found senior citizens who were not sick left in rooms with COVID patients.

There was negligence and people died. People died in numbers that are of wartime totals: 3,700 of our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts died from that negligence. We should have learned a lesson, but we did not. There was a belief that we would just carry on and hope we would get through, that maybe all the vaccines would come and maybe we could end the lockdowns more quickly.

Now we are into this third wave, where the people who are dying are the young, the racialized, the indigenous and those in urban centres because they have to go to work. They have no choice. Doug Ford's solution was that he was going to call the cops, stop them on their way to work and make sure the kids could not play in the playgrounds.

We never heard the Prime Minister once step up about what is happening in Peel and Brampton in those factories and the Amazon warehouse, which is a partner of the Liberal government and where 900 people became sick, and say that we have to deal with this as a national disaster. Let us face it, Canada, it is because they are considered disposable people, and the disposable people are the indigenous, racialized people working in these factories.

We lost 13-year-old Emily Victoria Viegas. She should not have died, but her parents had to go to work because Doug Ford and the Prime Minister are arguing about something everybody knows we need, which is a proper sick day benefit. Why are they saving money with this? What it is doing is extending the length of this crisis.

I received my first vaccine the other day, and I was very proud, but I am told I will not get my second dose until August. That is a long time in the life of a pandemic. Canada had the opportunity to produce the AstraZeneca vaccine here and we turned it down. The government opted for the international market. We are falling further and further behind. We are now 33rd globally for doses per 100 people. We are 74th globally for the number of people who are fully vaccinated. When I see the Liberals come into the House and pat themselves on the back about what a great job they are doing, I find that to be an absolute shameful disgrace because it is about the Liberal Party brand, not about the fact that as a federal government they could have been bringing the people together and that we needed an emergency response to an unprecedented catastrophe. That is what this is, a catastrophe.

We also see Canada on the global stage stealing vaccines from the third world because the Liberals blew it here. They took from the COVAX vaccine program. The fact is that Canada has been called out by third world countries for blocking the WTO waiver for them to produce their own vaccines. I would ask the Prime Minister if he, Mr. Davos, Mr. Trust the Global Markets, thinks this pandemic will not come and hit us even harder, with more virulent strains, if the third world is not able to be vaccinated. We are in this crisis right now because of the new strains coming out of places like Brazil. As it stands now, even if we get vaccinated by the end of the year, we will not have worldwide vaccine immunity until 2023. The potential we have seen from this disastrous virus is that it is mutating fast and getting more virulent. The fact that the Prime Minister is using Canada on the international stage to stop the ability of third world countries to produce their own vaccines because he wants to protect the intellectual patent rights of big pharma shows that the Prime Minister is more than willing to put corporate interests ahead of the lives of people, and that will come back to bite Canada in a very concerning and deep way.

What COVID has taught us is this. We hit this catastrophe last March and realized very quickly that within three weeks millions of Canadians would not have enough financial savings to pay their rent. We learned that our trust in global free trade meant that we did not even have the capacity to create PPE and workers were having to go into very dangerous situations on the front lines because Canada could not make its own PPE. When the decision could have been made a year ago to start investing in vaccines, like the company in Calgary that is trying to get Canadian vaccines on the market, we opted to trust international capital to look after us, and it is not looking after us.

We need to bring people together at this time. This third wave could easily become a much more dangerous fourth wave. We need to start putting the needs of Canadians first and respect the incredible suffering and vigilance that Canadians are showing. We need to rise to where the average Canadian is, stop playing these games and get a plan to save lives, particularly now, when we are seeing so many young people die in the factories and warehouses in the GTA.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the member for his intervention and his passion. He mentioned a couple of things. He said that the government should have brought people together to deal with this emergency response. He also mentioned that Canada has been taking vaccines from third world countries through COVAX, which I agree is shameful. How does he feel the government has come together during this time? It keeps championing that it is doing this team Canada approach. Being in opposition, does he feel there has been any kind of a team Canada approach to get everyone together to really battle this crisis we are in?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, last March I was very hopeful. I really took the Prime Minister at his word about the team Canada approach, that we are all in this together. We stopped everything every day to listen to the Prime Minister's updates, because we wanted to know, we wanted to be able to reassure people that everybody at Parliament had their back, and that is what Canadians were expecting.

However, I see more and more that we are dealing now with spin, with classic government misinformation, rather than this opportunity that we had to set up a national emergency response, to bring in military experts, health experts, representatives from across the country to say, “What do we need to do and how do we need to do it?” I think that is what Canadians were looking for. Instead, we see a Prime Minister who has a total laissez-faire attitude: “Hey, it's not our jurisdiction. It's the provinces. If they ask us, maybe we'll do something.”

That is not good enough. People are dying. Canadians need to know that their government has their backs, and Canadians do not have that assurance right now.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Madam Speaker, I listened carefully to my colleague's speech. I think he raised some good points.

He took a lot of shots at the Liberal government, and rightly so, but we are here to debate a motion that essentially says the government must “ensure that every Canadian adult has access to a vaccine by the May long weekend”. That is the motion we are debating today.

I understand that we can talk about other things, about the situation, about vaccination and about the rollout, but I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on whether this motion is realistic or partisan.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would love it if every Canadian is vaccinated by the May long weekend, but I am not going to go back to the people in my region and tell them the Conservatives said “Poof, make it happen” and it will happen. Canadians know better.

We do not have the capacity right now to get us to the May long weekend. What the motion should be asking is how we are going to make sure it happens by the summer, what we are going to do and what plans are in place. The idea that we are going to suddenly declare that it is going to happen will not make it thus, and this is my concern here. We need to tell Canadians that we are taking this seriously.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, anti-lockdown, anti-mask and anti-vaccine activists across the country have been reported to have direct and indirect ties to the far right. This issue is not just about access to vaccine. This is also about vaccine hesitancy that is being caused by these far-right groups. Entire communities are choosing not to be vaccinated, in part due to the efforts of these movements in promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories, which is something the member mentioned.

In fact, last week in Manitoba, there were 400 people with no masks gathered at The Forks, while yesterday two 20-year-old first nation men, youth, died of COVID-19.

What does the hon. member have to say when it comes to the harm and violence that these far-right groups are causing?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think this is something we need to be talking about in the House. The rise of this anti-vax movement is deeply tied with the extreme right, and that we have idiots like Randy Hillier, a well-known Conservative, and his friend from Hastings—Lennox and Addington, a man who I believe is disgracing the role of a public official, and the fact that they are getting away with it.

Canadians are fed up with this. Canadians know that the extreme right is trying to undermine our health responses for its own needs, and we have to stand up to that. We have to say that it is wrong, and that it is about hate.

[Chris d'Entremont, Conservative, West Nova, NS]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.

It is my pleasure to stand and speak for a few moments today, not only about the situation here in Nova Scotia, but also to the motion we have before us from my hon. colleague from Calgary Nose Hill and, of course, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

It is hard to figure out where to start with this one. Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada has been put up as the poster child of what should be done because of our relatively low numbers, yet it seems that all the provinces are experiencing their third waves of COVID-19.

Looking back, we have a year of data now to see when and how COVID entered our communities. Our first wave had its maximum number of COVID instances back on April 23 of last year, when Nova Scotia had 55 citizens with COVID-19. I know that does not sound like a whole lot, but that is a big number for the folks here in Nova Scotia.

Our second wave happened close to six months later. On November 24, 2020, there were 37 cases here in Nova Scotia, which pales in consideration to what we are seeing during our third wave, which hit 96 cases on April 27. I think there were 75 cases yesterday, and there are 70 cases today.

This may be an indication of cases starting to wane a little bit, but we do not know what will happen over the next number of days. We have a maximum right now of 489 active cases here in Nova Scotia, with 2,290 total cases since the beginning of COVID-19 and, unfortunately, 80 deaths, and we all offer our condolences to those families that have been affected by it.

In comparison, the issue of vaccinations here in Nova Scotia has been average compared to what we have seen across Canada, although maybe not to the level of what we see in Quebec. Ultimately, 3.7% of Nova Scotians have received the second dose, so only 3.7% of Nova Scotians are actually fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Just to give colleagues an idea, we have 345,000 vaccines received, and 293,000 administered, which comes into that false number the government tends to provide to us, where it looks as though 22%, or a quarter, of our population has received some kind of a vaccine.

I think the real number that is important to us is that of the fully vaccinated, which is only 3.7%. We need to make sure that we are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to stop the variants or, at least, the production of variants in our province. We really need to do a better job of getting vaccines to Nova Scotians and to Canadians, so we can at least stop these extra waves.

Quite honestly, I am very worried. I am sure other Nova Scotians are worried as well. We are worried that we are going to see a fourth and a fifth wave as we are waiting for vaccines to totally roll out here in this provinces. I know our premier has said that hopefully by July we will have everybody done, but quite honestly, does that mean one vaccination or two? I know that my mum and dad had their first Pfizer vaccinations, and it looks like it will be toward the end of July, maybe into August, before they will be able to get their second doses.

As far as being a sort of poster child, we do have concerns here in Atlantic Canada with this third wave of COVID-19. We need to do better. The government has to do better in its procurement. It could have done better in its production here in Canada, yet it did not.

We had a number of presentations at the health committee, and what concerned me the most were the researchers who came to us and said they have a process that, had the government truly invested in a Canadian vaccine, we would have had in production by now. We would not have needed to go to all these other companies to receive vaccines.

It goes counter to what the government continues to say. It says we have the largest portfolio of any country, with 10 or 15 contracts with different producers of vaccine, yet we are still working on three, with Johnson & Johnson coming. We have very little local production of vaccine. In fact, there is no production of vaccine happening here in Canada. We do have researchers right across the country who have had great success in coming up with technologies to be able to provide vaccines to Canadians, but there is little to no interest from the government in trying to come up with a Canadian solution to this.

I would like to speak to something the previous couple of speakers spoke to as well, and it is the hands-off way of providing vaccines to Canadians. The Minister of Public Services and Procurement said in her presentation earlier today that, if we do not like the vaccination plan, to take it up with the premiers. Yes, okay, but she is responsible for providing vaccines to all Canadians. As much as the premiers have cried and talked and tried to get a reasonable response from the government, they continue to wane and are unable to provide vaccines to their populations. They are trying to find methods.

Quite honestly, when it comes to travel, from one end of Canada to the other, this third wave here in Atlantic Canada is happening because of differing and varying responsibilities or regulations in different provinces. I do not know if this is substantiated or not, but the story here is that people have been moving here from different provinces. People from Ontario and Quebec are buying properties here in Atlantic Canada, in Nova Scotia, and, by the sound of it, they brought this third wave when we had extremely low numbers. I believe it is mostly the U.K. variant being found here.

That is coupled with the whole reversal of having an Atlantic bubble. One minute we had it, then premiers were talking together, and the next minute our premier decided that people from New Brunswick and P.E.I. could visit, even though we could not go there. There was a whole bunch of miscommunications and messes because there is no leadership from the federal government on how any of this should be rolling down.

There are definitely politics involved in this. The Prime Minister and the current government really want, if it does go south and things do not work out, to be able to just hold up their hands and say, “Well, that is the province's problem and responsibility. It is not ours.”

Ultimately, it is always the leadership of the federal government, with the partnership of the provinces, that gets things done here in Canada. The Liberals need to take a leadership role in this to make sure that we get through this third wave, beyond the third wave and do not have a fourth wave.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this motion. Let us hope that everybody, sooner than later, can get a vaccine in their arm.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am curious whether the member can explain the rationale of this motion to the House.

I encourage the member to not just take it from the Liberals, but to listen to what the NDP and Bloc members have been saying. They are saying that the Conservatives literally cannot accomplish what they have set out to accomplish with this motion.

Can the member provide some kind of rationale as to why the Conservatives chose to bring forward this motion instead of hitting on something meaningful, such as encouraging the government to develop a vaccine-hesitation strategy? Why put forward this motion, which is practically not possible? The Conservatives are being told this not just by Liberals but also by the NDP and the Bloc.

[Chris d'Entremont, Conservative, West Nova, NS]

Madam Speaker, quite honestly, we need a plan. There is no plan.

We continually hear the government talking about its portfolio. It is not talking about a real vaccination plan, saying that is the problem of the provinces. How can we truly judge whether the Liberal government is doing a good job when it does not let us know what it is actually going to do? It needs to provide us with a date and let us know when that is actually going to be.

If it fails, we will oppose. If the government does it right, I will congratulate it. My constituents want the vaccine.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Madam Speaker, I want my colleague from West Nova to know that I really enjoy working with him. He is a man of integrity who works very hard for his constituents.

Let us come back to the motion. Even the Liberals are saying to go ahead and criticize them, but to be real about it. We just heard a member across the way say that.

Unfortunately, I agree with the Liberals that this motion does not get the job done, and there is certainly plenty of work to do. There are plenty of reasons to look at the Liberals' record on vaccine administration. The Liberals have failed on many levels.

I would like to hear what my colleague has to say about this. Does he think the wording of the motion is realistic? Does he think it is realistic for the Conservative Party to demand that every Canadian citizen be vaccinated by the May long weekend?