Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Pickering—Uxbridge, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health.
It is an honour to rise today to talk about such an incredibly important issue.
The member from Edmonton asked why I was taking the approach that the Conservatives are being overly partisan about this. It is because they have come into the House, and every Conservative, one after another, has only talked about vaccines. Yes, vaccines are very important. They are important to getting through this. They are important to getting through to the other side, but there are other important things too.
When the Conservatives come in here and only talk about vaccines, it makes me wonder why they will not talk about things that the provincial governments are responsible for, or other things the federal government could be doing. I think there is a lot of criticism to go around.
As we look back on this years from now, we will be able to say the federal government should have done this, or the federal government should have been more prepared. I hope we learn from this. If we do not learn from this, then what will we have accomplished?
First and foremost, I hope we learn that we need to do something about our vaccine manufacturing in this country, our biomanufacturing of vaccines. We need to make sure that when the next pandemic happens, because history tells us it will at some point, we are better prepared.
I am willing to let that responsibility go around, and I am willing to say that Liberals were just as responsible for that as Conservatives were in the past, but I do not think anyone saw it coming. Therefore, there was not an urgent need placed on it. Yes, we do need to do something about making sure that it is better.
When history looks back on this, we will also look at ourselves and say, when we were weighing the options, did we put too much emphasis on the economy and not enough emphasis on the advice of medical professionals? I really get a kick out of some of the stuff I have heard, not just today in this debate, but over the last number of weeks and months, and how sometimes there seems to be a complete disregard for the experts and for science.
It is based on emotion. I do not want to say ideology, but it is based on emotion. I want this to be over too, but that does not mean I should believe everything I see on the Internet that suggests there is an easier way.
From the beginning, I have always said I will take my health advice from the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada and, more importantly, the medical officer of health in my riding of Kingston and the Islands, Dr. Kieran Moore, who has done a phenomenal job of taking care of our community. For some reason, there has been this desire out there to disregard experts. If we do not shut that narrative down, we are only complicit in helping that narrative snowball and build momentum. I think that people in the House are responsible for allowing narratives to continue on.
Who else should we trust? If I am on an airplane and the pilot suddenly passes out, and we are looking for someone to fly the plane, and someone says they are a pilot, I am going to tell them to get in the cockpit and land that thing. Likewise, I am going to believe the experts and the medical officers of health, the people who have studied pandemics and have planned for them, and take their advice.
When they say lockdowns are important, then I am going to believe them. I do not understand how a body such as this, the House of Commons, has come to a place where we regularly disagree with medical experts. It absolutely boggles my mind.
When the Conservatives come in here, they are only talking about vaccines. Yes, there is a lot we could have done to do a better job of making sure we were prepared, and that includes Conservatives, Liberals and opposition parties pushing the agenda.
I know there were no Conservatives before March 2020 asking why we were not making more vaccines in the country or where our manufacturing is for this. Nobody was saying that over the last five or 10 years. No Liberal was saying it when Stephen Harper was the prime minister either because we did not see this coming.
In the same regard, we have to respect the fact that we can criticize this government's approach and delivery of vaccines as a result of the infrastructure and resources that were in place. We can criticize that. It is fair to criticize. I think history can look back on that and see where we went wrong, where we went right and how it played out.
What we cannot be critical about is that the government did lay out the exact plan. The provinces knew what the timeline was going to be. They were told in the late fall what they should expect in terms of vaccines coming along.
The only part of that plan that had a hiccup was the 10 days back in February, which the Conservatives keep talking about, when one of the primary delivery manufacturers of vaccines retooled its plant so that it could produce more vaccines, but we still ended up getting caught up very quickly.
By the end of March, provinces received more vaccines than they were told they were going to have. They were originally scheduled to get 29 million vaccines by the end of June, but now they will be getting closer to 50 million. They are getting more vaccines than they were told they were going to get.
Yes, we can be critical, but the provinces knew this was the schedule. In Ontario, and I am sure it is the same in Alberta, the province, on February 11, had its projection of the third wave and knew exactly what it would be getting and when it would be getting it. The federal government delivered more than it promised, yet the provinces still did not use other measures in order to curb the third wave. Instead, they relied on hoping that maybe, miraculously, things would go even better than the schedule, which was a horrible plan.
I regret that we are here and having this conversation, as I am sure everybody does, but at the end of the day, I genuinely believe that, if a province wants to work with the federal government, it has to take the information we have been giving it on vaccines and plan according to that. They need to understand that medical experts are going to give them advice, and they could say the vaccines we are going to get will not get us beyond the third wave. They could say we better do something about this now and start talking about other measures, such as lockdowns.
I have yet to hear a Conservative tonight say that they support lockdowns, which I cannot understand because they have happened throughout the entire world, and they have been shown to be effective. This is just like two years ago when they could not utter the words “climate change”. They cannot even utter the words because they are afraid of saying it, and I do not know why.
