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.