Madam Speaker, on behalf of the NDP caucus, I would also like to thank the member for Saint-Laurent and the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes for their initiative in bringing this important legislation before the House today and for the discussions that will follow.
This also shows how important it is for all members to come together to have these conversations and get this bill passed.
I would also like to thank Rabbi Reuven Bulka and everyone at the Kind Canada Généreux organization.
Our thoughts are with Rabbi Bulka. We hope that his health improves and wish him a full recovery. Our thoughts are with him today.
We are talking about kindness. Putting in place a kindness week is an important symbol of where we want our society to go, how we want our society to interact and how we want people to work together. I believe we all want to build a society of kindness. Of that there is no doubt.
We have seen particular examples of the imperative of kindness through the course of this pandemic. I will mention just a few cases of how we have seen Canadians and people around the world come together in an unprecedented way during the pandemic, and one might argue because of the pandemic.
In my community, we have seen people taking care of each other's neighbours, making sure shut-ins seniors are getting what they need, whether it is groceries or medication. People are taking care of each other, showing acts of kindness in a very deliberate, organized and focused way.
We have also seen the countless acts of kindness that come from our health care workers and first responders. They are on the front lines. They are vulnerable to COVID and its variants, yet we have seen countless cases of nurses, health care workers and first responders such as firefighters stepping up despite the danger and showing ongoing acts of kindness and its importance.
The stories of health care workers who share the final moments of people passing away from COVID despite the risk to themselves, knowing nobody else can come in and spend those final hours with those COVID patients, have been repeated across Canada, but we have also seen them around the world. There have been countless cases of courage and kindness coming together at critical, dangerous times.
I have seen organizations in my community come together to put into effect the importance of kindness. Two community organizations that have come together during COVID are Caring During COVID in Burnaby and Helping Hands in New Westminster. These are groups of local residents: volunteers who have come together to perpetuate, amplify, repeat and multiply acts of kindness throughout the community.
These are all examples of the strength kindness can bring to a community, a region, a country and indeed to the entire world.
We see these very acts of kindness repeated across the country. Look at the nurses, doctors and health care workers who often risk their own lives to perform acts of kindness.
This shows that courage and kindness can work together, even during a pandemic, and even when people's lives are at stake.
I am not sharing information that we do not know when I also say we have seen a disturbing rise in the opposition to acts of kindness, the toxic opposition which is acts and incidents of hate. It is something that we need to call out. We have seen increased cases of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia. All of those hatreds have also increased during this pandemic.
There is no doubt that the vast majority of Canadians know the importance of ensuring that acts of hate and incidents of hate are eliminated, but it does show that the idea of a kindness week and perpetrating acts of kindness is not a passive work. It is an active work and it also makes it a part of all our responsibilities, the importance of stepping up against any act of hate, any hate speech and any incidents of hate that occur in our community.
Kindness also means fighting hatred. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, there has been an increase in hateful acts and hate speech. If we, as Canadians, want to promote kindness, we must do everything possible to put and end to these hateful acts.
How can we go beyond the acts of kindness in a kindness week? How can we ensure that we are truly a kind society? It really starts at the top. What that means is that when we talk about kindness and a kindness week, it is not only the relationship of Canadians with each other; it is also the relationship of our institutions with Canadians.
When we see the rising number of homelessness in our country, that is very clearly an abandoning of leadership around perpetrating acts of kindness. When we see people who are crying out for medication and public universal pharmacare and do not have the wherewithal to pay for their medication at this critical time, that is also a call for acts of kindness that come from our institutions and ensure that kindness is at every level of our society. We see people, as I do in my community, who do not have access to basic dental work. I have seen first-hand the critical impact of not having dental care in our country when a person's teeth start to fall out. That also is a call to action for kindness at every level.
When we are talking about acts of kindness and when we are talking about our institutions reflecting acts of kindness, we are also talking about our institutions reflecting and responding to the needs of Canadians. What that means is that we, as parliamentarians and the government, should constantly keep in mind that if we adopt this legislation, our institutions as well must be wedded to the vision of a society of kindness.
We must work on all fronts to ensure that our institutions also reflect the importance of kindness throughout society.
I will end with two quotes.
The first is from Rabbi Reuven Bulka who said, “Being kind is nothing more than being truly human. The kinder we are, the better all humanity will be.”
The second quote is from former official opposition leader, Jack Layton, who many believe to be the greatest prime minister Canada never had. Just before he passed he said, “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world.”