Mr. Speaker, as the member of Parliament for the magnificent riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, it is my privilege to represent the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces here in Canada and serving our country abroad.
My question for the Prime Minister was about providing protection from COVID-19 for soldiers being deployed overseas to Ukraine. I asked the same question for soldiers deployed outside of Canada in Latvia.
Since the start of the pandemic, over 1,525 members of the Canadian Armed Forces have contracted the virus, an infection rate that is almost double the rate of the rest of the Canadian population. Today we were told that there are 100 active COVID cases among our soldiers. Soldiers are at a higher risk. Yesterday, the news reported a COVID outbreak at Garrison Petawawa. This follows a news report of an outbreak in the civilian population near Garrison Petawawa.
The Prime Minister’s vaccine policy is putting Canadians at unnecessary risk. Leadership means giving an at-risk soldier a vaccine shot before virtue signalling in front of a camera. Once again, the Prime Minister has failed the leadership test. The Prime Minister’s open-door COVID policy is needlessly exposing Canadians to the COVID-19 virus. The decision to deploy soldiers to Ukraine without first being vaccinated is another bad decision by the Prime Minister, who has a record of bad decisions.
The Prime Minister knew that Ukraine was struggling to get access to vaccines. Out of the 2.05 million COVID cases in Ukraine, 43,391 deaths have been recorded. Over 400,000 Ukrainians are sick with the virus and Ukraine's health care system is in crisis. Hospitals are overflowing. They are short-staffed, with acute equipment shortages. Ten thousand new cases were recorded in the last 24 hours, with 432 COVID-related deaths in the same time period. This is in a population slightly larger than Canada’s. It was into this environment, an area suffering from a raging pandemic, that the Liberal Prime Minister sent unvaccinated soldiers.
The subsequent order from the Prime Minister to scavenge a vaccine from a country where soldiers are being deployed is beyond outrageous. Unless the Prime Minister has ordered Health Canada to approve the use of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine on Canadian soldiers, with its 50% efficacy rate, the communist vaccine is not even legal in Canada. The Prime Minister knows that the Chinese vaccine is the only vaccine available in Ukraine to inject into soldiers’ arms.
Canadian soldiers cannot scavenge COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX initiative because they are not available. The first shipment of vaccines from COVAX did not arrive in Ukraine until April 16. COVAX is the global vaccine-sharing initiative, and it is intended to provide vaccines for poor and middle-income countries. Without COVAX, many of the world's poorest countries would have no vaccines at all.