Madam Speaker, I rise in the House today to speak about this third wave and the response to COVID-19. I really wish I did not have to rise today to speak about this because I have seen the plight this pandemic has hit people with.
People are at home, and people are frustrated. Businesses are closing, and people want to get back to work. They are absolutely frustrated with the lack of strategy. Dozens of countries have recently announced opening up their borders to the United States. It is a country that, early on in this, the Prime Minister criticized for its response to this pandemic.
I am speaking to this motion today, while last week Australia hosted its largest sporting event since the beginning of the pandemic last March. What is going on in Canada? In parts of the country we still cannot have even more than five people at an outdoor gathering. This is just not acceptable. Canada has fully vaccinated just under 3% of its population. It is a low figure.
It has also been explained that we have been spreading out the shots, going off label. Only 30%, a figure the government has been bragging about, has had one shot, so we are certainly behind when we try to measure against other countries. We should be doing better.
In the United States, we see cases and hospitalizations are dropping. We see businesses opening up and restaurants getting busy. Fans are returning to watch their favourite sports. Canadians are seeing this happen. They are also seeing the lack of response in our country and how we are falling behind.
The U.S. is able to do this because its population is getting vaccinated, so this is a sorry state of affairs. I often think about what the rest of the world is saying to itself. What on earth happened to Canada? We used to be known for, if nothing else, our kindness, our love of hockey and our great health care system. Those are things that we should be proud of and that we are known for.
Now we have positioned ourselves so people are looking at us to ask what happened to Canada, why we are so far behind and why we are continuing to add to lockdowns as the variants come. It is because of a lack of vaccines.
The exodus of small businesses breaks my heart. When we talk about who is essential to the economy, we think about the ma-and-pa operators whose businesses very much define who they are. It is essential to them. Since January this year, 220,000 have closed. Another ugly stat is that we hold the highest unemployment rate in the G7. This just should not be happening in Canada.
The worst part of all this is, rather than showing us there is a light at the end of the tunnel, which I guess is September, or showing us how we can get our lives back to normal like the rest of the world, the government is providing measures to help people, but unfortunately those measures are to keep them inside because we cannot get enough vaccines or enough testing in this country to get people back to work.
That is what it is all about, after all. I think it is a question of when there will be another global pandemic and whether the government, the next go-around, will call for lockdowns, saying that is what we have to do. Could we not be better prepared? Could governments not give Canadians better confidence that we are better prepared?
We should have learned from SARS and other pandemics and been better prepared. Certainly, we had some of that. We had PPE that was sitting in warehouses that was actually sent to a dump. We sent PPE to another country early on, and we had a shortfall. That is not planning. That is not being ready, and that is not having a strategy.
The reality of this situation is that investment in health care and manufacturing capacity cannot just be a one-time deal. We can look at AstraZeneca. It has been reported that we are paying significantly more than other countries, and we do not have the manufacturing capacity here in Canada to produce it. I would not really care about the dollar value of what we are paying if we were getting delivery, if we were ahead of the game, and if we could demonstrate we were getting better results because of paying more.
When we measure ourselves against other countries, that is not the case. The evidence is there. Look at Israel and what it was able to do without manufacturing capacity. Where is our government, and where was it early on in negotiations?
We have demonstrated as a country, particularly within North America, that when we work with our partners, we overcome extraordinary issues. I think of NORAD and how that was established with great co-operation between our two great countries. Where were we early on to not be with our American partners, determining how to protect North America and creating a strategy that worked for both of us? Where were we?
Even if we can get our manufacturing squared up in Canada, we cannot just rely on ourselves. We have to be part of a strategic initiative with other countries and industry. After a slow start, Pfizer, its partner BioNTech and Moderna raised the game and raised their output, gaining experience, scaling up production and taking steps to produce certain raw material on their own. The U.S.A. got in front of this and leveraged businesses and the public sector to step in.
We have enormous talent in this country. We should have reached out. We should have, as the U.S. and U.K. did, looked for solutions early on. We have the talent in this country to do it, and it was sadly missed by the government, either by ignoring it or being slow to recognize it.
The U.S. government gave vaccine makers access to supplies under the Defense Production Act, which provided $105 million in funding to help Merck make doses of the J&J COVID-19 vaccine and expedite materials to be used in its production. They got in front of it.
There will be no economic recovery in its entirety without a health recovery. We need a line of sight. We need some measurables, and we need to understand where we are going and what the plan is. That is what this motion is about.
One can criticize whether we can get there by May, but one of the frustrations of Canadians is there is no plan. We need to see the government move forward and set targets, measure them against other jurisdictions and demonstrate to Canadians it is on top of this.
We needed leadership on rapid procurement. We did not see leadership on it. Saying that POs have been written, that we have the biggest procurement strategy and the most POs out there, has not resulted in vaccines in the arms of Canadians. We should we ashamed that we have not been able to execute that better.
There is a lack of leadership on manufacturing. I recognize the government is now showing interest in this and is starting to put some time, money and effort into this area, which has been needed. I send my congratulations on that, albeit late.
I mentioned collaboration with the U.S. There is no reason we should not be able to work with our partners because we are such an integrated economy. We need to bring experts together to make sure we could get this right. If we did not know it before, this is something we should know now. I encourage the government to bring those experts together and make sure we are reacting to this better and properly preparing for the future.
It has been a year. We are still behind in testing. While the rest of the world has sped ahead, there is virtually no talk about the border reopening at this point. It does not even hit the headlines when the border closure between the U.S. and Canada is extended.
Overall, there has been a gross lack of leadership. At the end of the day, people are frustrated. They want to get back to work. They do not want to operate in bubbles anymore. Enough is enough. Let us show some leadership. The people I represent in the great riding of Edmonton Centre demand more of us. Let us get a plan and get people back to work.
