Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Edmonton—Wetaskiwin.
It is a privilege to speak on behalf of the constituents of Edmonton Mill Woods. My constituents, like those right across Canada, are having a very difficult time coping with the current spike in COVID-19 cases and the accompanying lockdowns. It is unfortunate that we are even in this position to be having this emergency debate and that we could have so easily been in an emergency debate on many of the cases that we have seen and are currently seeing right across the country.
In the last seven days, we have seen the Atlantic bubble burst, with Nova Scotia seeing nearly 800 cases over the last week. Nunavut, which just weeks ago had zero cases, is now facing its own outbreak. We are still seeing British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec continue to cope and grapple with the third wave. We are in this position today because the response of the Liberal government throughout the pandemic has been slow and confusing at every single step.
Let us go back to the beginning of this pandemic when we were just seeing the reports of the first cases that we all then called the coronavirus. My colleague from Edmonton Riverbend, then our shadow minister for health, had questioned the government consistently on its plans for stopping flights from Wuhan province, when the health minister said that closing the border was not effective at all. On January 28, 2020, over a year ago, we learned from the health minister that the first individual identified with the coronavirus did not self-identify when entering Canada. He had travelled from Wuhan and had a cough. The Minister of Health stated that this individual took exactly the appropriate precautions that he was given at the border, and that the systems were working and were working very well.
One year later, and with more examples than I have time to discuss tonight of the Liberal government's failure, our entire country is facing lockdowns and restrictions over and over again. This stands in stark contrast to places like the United States and Britain where restrictions are being eased and economies are reopening. What is the difference between Canada and those other countries? It is vaccines. While both the U.K. and the United States were rushing to secure vaccines for their citizens, Canada stood at the back of the line, dawdling.
The government pursued a dubious vaccine partnership with CanSino, a Chinese state-owned company. The deal fell apart almost immediately after the Prime Minister made the big announcement about it. It took only a week for the Chinese communist government to stop necessary materials from being exported to Canada so research and production could happen. It was the only leading vaccine that the Liberal government was pushing to be made in Canada. Instead of working with the private sector to build vaccine production capacity right here in our own country with companies like Providence Therapeutics, just one of the 17 companies that have submitted proposals to build and roll out pharmaceutical strategies in Alberta, the Liberal government decided to build a new vaccine facility which will not be ready until 2022 at the earliest, well after the pandemic should be under control.
The government's failure on procuring vaccines is shown with the wait times between the doses. The four-month wait period is longer than that of any other country in the world and contrary to the advice of the developer and manufacturer of that vaccine. The Liberal government has forced an off-label usage of vaccines only because there is insufficient supply. The NACI has acknowledged it would not be recommending a four-month delay if there were sufficient supply. This, of course, is leading to more COVID cases, more vulnerability. This is the result of the government's failures.
As I mentioned earlier, another massive failure by the Liberal government has been in being very slow on closing the border. For more than a year, we have been calling for greater border measures to protect against COVID-19 and ministers of the government said that we were spreading fear and scaremongering.
More recently, we saw the ravaging effect that the variants of the virus were having. The double variant in India was first identified in October. The government continued to see variant cases pop up right across our country, most notably in British Columbia and Ontario. Now we are seeing the effects of these variants right across the country. Today, nearly 60% of the active cases in Alberta are variant cases. Simply, we needed the government to listen to our calls to secure the border. Its slowness is why we are here today.
Despite all of that, the Prime Minister has come out and said he has no regrets regarding his leadership throughout this pandemic. That is astonishing. He has no regrets that the government shut down our pandemic early warning system months before COVID-19 happened. He has no regrets that the government sent hundreds of thousands of masks, gloves, gowns and the government's own reserves to China, leading to our own health care professionals and first responders being forced to ration their own PPE and recycle masks. He has no regrets on telling Canadians that the risk was low at the beginning of the pandemic. He has no regrets about not securing our border at the beginning of the pandemic or stopping flights from hot spots earlier as variants were ravaging countries across the globe. He has no regrets about the mental health crisis that my community of Edmonton Mill Woods and communities right across Canada have been struggling with as a result of lost lives, livelihoods and more lockdowns.
For us to prevent the surge in cases we are seeing right across Canada, we needed to vaccinate Canadians in January and February, like the United States did. By the end of February, only 4% of Canadians had received their first shot, while 10% of Americans were fully vaccinated. From the very beginning, the Liberal government has been slow and confused at every step, leading us into this situation. Its slowness to procure the vaccines that we needed was a major contributor to this third wave. Its slowness to close the borders as highly contagious variants were emerging across the globe left us vulnerable to the same variants that are driving the third wave today. My constituents in Edmonton Mill Woods and all Canadians deserve better.