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.