Mr. Speaker, I am looking at the calendar. It is April 29 today. It has been over a year since the start of the pandemic, and we are watching countries around the world have benchmarks and advice for reopening. We are watching them emerge from the pandemic. On April 29, 2021 in Canada, no Canadian has a line of sight on when restrictions will be safely and permanently lifted. Not a single person in this country has a line of sight on that. That lack of understanding of when things are going to be back to some level of hope has precipitated a third wave. Instead of having vaccines in January and February of this year, we are sitting in a third wave. That is the reality. If we had received more vaccines in January and February, we would not be sitting in a third wave that is this severe. That is a fact.
Every week, somebody from the federal government is standing up saying that the government is not getting the Moderna shipments this week, or something has changed with AstraZeneca, or it is not sure about Pfizer. Every week there is another announcement that has some level of uncertainty about vaccines. It has to stop. We need some hope going forward. We need certainty.
We have raised motions in this House asking the government to start looking at benchmarks for a safe reopening. Looking back, I think the reason why the government is so reticent to do this is that it does not have a line of sight on the vaccination status. It keeps reiterating these talking points, but fewer than 3% of Canadians are fully vaccinated. That is a remarkable failure.
Papers and academic journals have emerged showing that, particularly with the Pfizer vaccine, immunity may wane significantly if the second dose is delayed beyond the recommended 21 days. Will we be having another opposition day motion or debate in a month or a month and a half on a fourth wave because we are seeing that immunity is waning in people who had the first Pfizer shot, some of the most vulnerable in our country, such as frontline workers, long-term care residents and others, and COVID is spreading among them? That is a question the government cannot answer. It has not received enough supply to deal with this question. This is why it is so imperative for the government to get us more vaccines.
Let us talk about something I have tried to raise in question period, which is the ethics of how the government is getting us vaccines. Rather than scouring the country and doing everything possible to build up manufacturing capacity over the last year, we still do not have a line of sight on when the first dose of a Canadian-manufactured COVID vaccine will be administered in Canada. We do not have an answer to that. Instead of doing that, we are completely reliant on other countries.
Let us look at a country like India, which has supplied vaccines to the world and is one of the world's largest producers of vaccines, and it is going through an enormous third wave right now. We are a G7 country. Why have the Liberals not done more to address this in the last year? Why do we not have the answer to the question of when the first dose of Canadian-produced vaccine is going to be administered in Canada? Why are we guessing about when immunity might wane with Pfizer when people who have had their first dose do not know when they will get their second dose? This is a real problem.
Canadians, regardless of political stripe, are tired of this guessing game. They are tired of the uncertainty. How can provincial governments plan their vaccine strategies when the targets move every week? We have to start setting aspirational targets. Every party in the House, except for the Liberals, is doing that. Why can we not have enough vaccine that every Canadian can have an available dose by the end of May? Why is that not possible? Our peer countries, like the U.S. and the U.K., have been able to do that. If the government has the most efficient, effective portfolio of vaccines, why is this an issue?
I could reiterate for colleagues in the House things that everybody knows. We know that the government paid a higher amount for the AstraZeneca vaccine than other countries did. However, I do not think we have received a single doze of the AstraZeneca vaccine from our contract with AstraZeneca. We have only received the AstraZeneca vaccine from the COVAX fund and on loan from the United States. We paid double for something we have not even received, yet other countries have received it. How did that happen?
What recourse do we have with these manufacturers? What is in those contracts? The EU is considering litigating AstraZeneca over this issue. Why are we not? We need to set a target. We need certainty going forward, and that is why this motion is in front of the House today. We cannot just keep moving the goal post for Canadians who need to reopen their business, who are worried about getting sick, for ICU employees and front-line workers who do not know how they will manage. We cannot keep doing this. We have to set firm targets. We have to move hell and high water in the bureaucracy to get those targets met. We need to have a plan to get out of this.
This morning, I saw an advertisement, and I think it was in a British newspaper, essentially saying that the UK was moving out of the pandemic. Citizens in the United Kingdom have a line of sight on when they will move out of this, because of its ability to produce vaccines and because it has been able to set benchmarks. The Liberal government cannot do that. It will not even talk about these types of benchmarks because it does not have supply.
When an inquiry happens on this in a future Parliament, people are going to ask about the ethical decision of the Liberal government to delay dosing significantly beyond what manufacturers are recommending. It is because we have a shortage of vaccines. The Liberal talking points keep trying to muddy the waters on where Canada is on vaccination.
Less than 3% of Canadians are fully vaccinated. What happens in two or three months if further data emerges that shows there is actually a significant immunity problem or that immunity has waned so much, especially with the Pfizer vaccine, that people catch COVID again even though they have had their shot. This is a serious problem. We need that supply and we need it now.
The other thing this motion calls upon the government to do is to figure out the border. The government could have done so many things with regard to border restrictions. For colleagues who are listening and who might not realize this, the Indian double variant was identified in October of last year. How did that not get flagged by the Canadian government? How did that not translate into some level of action? Why are we not rapid testing even domestic passengers at airports? Why are we not prioritizing vaccination for essential workers going across the border, like truck drivers? Why is it that some people who travel across the border are exempted? There is a very spurious definition of essential worker.
These are things the government could be doing in the short term, while it is sorting out the vaccination issue, but it is not. The horses are out of the barn and every single time the government closes the gate behind them. It has been over a year. I think it is fair to call it gross incompetence at this point.
That is why these types of motions are needed. It is for the House to give the government direction when it refuses to give that direction to itself. That is what Parliament is for. We need firm targets, firm benchmarks that the government can be held to account for by the Canadian public, both on vaccine acquisition and administration as well as on reopening. Anything less than that just will not do.
Less than 3% of the country is fully vaccinated. We are stealing vaccines from Third World countries, because the government has not been able to figure this out. It has not taken recourse with these manufacturers. It is beyond the pale at this point.
I hope colleagues from other parties and the Liberal backbench will agree that this is something for which they should be holding the government to account. It is a firm timeline on vaccines so then there is direction to the executive to say that it will have to litigate these companies, that it will to have to get written confirmation from other countries to ensure there will not be export restrictions. This is the type of political will that is needed to get out of this crisis. If it is going to take the Conservative Party putting motion after motion in the House of Commons to get the government to do this, then so be it.