Debates of May 5th, 2021

COVID-19 in Alberta

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We will have to leave that there so we will have time for some other questions.

The hon. member for Edmonton—Wetaskiwin.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if the hon. member listened to my speech. Maybe he just came in time to ask the question because I referenced the fact that the targets were not good enough. They were not ambitious enough in the first place, so I ask who cares if we meet the targets.

We are talking about a target down the road of six vaccines for every Canadian three years from now. That does not matter right now. We needed vaccines when other countries in the G20 were getting them. We needed them when our closest comparators, the U.K. and the U.S., were getting vaccines months ago. We needed them. We are in this circumstance right now.

I am hearing questions about lockdowns tonight. The lockdowns are only necessary as a last resort, because we did not actually deliver vaccines and we did not do a good enough job on testing. We could get into a whole variety of things, such as our approach on the borders early on. We need a better plan, and the government has not delivered. We need—

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We will move on to the next question.

The hon. member for Calgary Shepard.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the member had an exchange earlier in the day with the parliament secretary to the government House leader talking about debates and us raising vaccines. The member rightly pointed out that the issue is numbers, targets and performance. That is what we are here to do. We are here to make sure the government is performing up to the expectations of Albertans and of Canadians. As of May 4, 85.5% of Alberta's vaccine supply has been used up. I am one of those who got vaccinated.

I wonder if the member could comment on the fact that we had not received the vaccines on time and in ample supply in January and February, and there were problems delivering them to people who wanted them. I was one of those who had difficulty getting an appointment. It kept getting cancelled because there was not enough vaccine supply. Could we have gotten that number even higher and gotten more of our population vaccinated to avoid these restrictions?

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, that is a fantastic point.

Obviously, if we had gotten similar numbers of vaccines delivered earlier and spread out over time, we would have been able to deliver them in a more efficient way. We would have put less pressure on our frontline responders.

By the way, I got vaccinated this past weekend with my first shot as well, and I want to use this opportunity to comment on the unbelievable professionalism of people running the vaccination centre in Alberta. I know folks across the province right now are putting in extra hours to make sure Albertans are getting vaccinated and doing fantastic work, but this would have been a very different story, had we been receiving vaccines at the same time as residents of—

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

There is a final question in this round.

The hon. member for Hastings—Lennox and Addington.

[Derek Sloan, Independent, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to raise my concern with the idea, not expressed by this particular member, but by others, that lockdowns are the answers to all our problems. Of course, we can cherry-pick different examples that seem to have been effective, but there are many studies that undermine the idea that blanket lockdowns are effective. There are many jurisdictions, for example Florida in relation to California, that have not been doing the lockdowns and are doing quite well.

Acting quickly is advisable, and targeted measures can be advisable, but locking everyone and all businesses down, in my view, is not helpful. I would like to also mention that Canada has failed to implement any other treatments. I am just reading the latest issue of the American Journal of Therapeutics that has a meta-analysis of 18 different studies that show significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Let us try new things and do whatever we can to address this virus.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure I sensed a question in that, so maybe I will give someone else a chance to actually ask me a question.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We are out of time, so we will now go to the next speaker.

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

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.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague said that all the Conservatives are talking about is vaccines and how important they are, and that is exactly right. My colleague also said there is no way anyone predicted this pandemic was coming, which is patently not true. That is what our early warning was in place for, the GPHIN program, but the Auditor General's report showed how poorly the Liberals mishandled the early warning system by dismantling the GPHIN program.

Would my colleague not admit dismantling the GPHIN program, our early warning pandemic system, has played a significant role in the position we are in today?

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I go back to what I was saying. History can look back and judge that stuff, absolutely, but the situation Alberta is in right now—

[An hon. member]

It would have been better.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

No, the member cannot say that would have been significantly impacted. It has been a year. It has been over a year. How can he possibly say that?

Medical experts, as in Ontario, were predicting the trajectories of the waves for Alberta and could calculate that against the arrival of vaccines. They did the calculations, they knew how it was going to go. In Ontario, unfortunately, it happened exactly as predicted because the province would not put in the lockdowns when it should have.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have spent time with the member on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and enjoyed working with him there.

Today what we really need to focus on, though, is the fact that Alberta has the highest active rate in this whole country. There are 508 active cases per every 100,000 people, and the next highest province is Ontario with 252. These numbers are terrifying and staggering, and I cannot imagine the fear and concern happening in Alberta.

We know that right now for the first time in history Alberta's doctors are literally being given emergency instructions on how to determine whether patients will receive life-saving treatment or not. I just cannot imagine making that decision as a health care provider.

Could this member please tell us when the Liberal government is going to step up and step in to protect Albertans?

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not understand why the NDP is fixated on the Emergencies Act. Tell me what more the federal government is going to give as a result of invoking this particular piece of legislation. The federal government is there. When Ontario said it needed the Red Cross, the federal government asked how soon. When Ontario said it needed rapid tests, the federal government said it would get them there. Things rolled out and are rolling out.

The federal government is there. The federal government wants to help. The federal government is continually in contact with the provinces asking what more they want from us. I do not understand why invoking this piece of legislation written on a bill is going to make the situation any better in terms of delivery. We will give them what they want. We will be there for the provinces. They just have to work with us, which they have been doing.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and to the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance]

Mr. Speaker, it is important we reflect on the fact this motion is about an absolute public health crisis going on in a Canadian province right now. It is not just the risk to an individual. When our health system's capacity is overwhelmed, if someone gets in a car accident there may not be a place for them to go.

The Conservative argument has been essentially that their vaccines did not come quickly enough. If we accept their argument, which I do not, I still do not understand how it justifies not putting in place the other public health measures we know will save lives. Can the hon. member offer his thoughts on the importance of putting those public health measures in place until there is herd immunity through vaccination to ensure we can save lives we know will be lost in the absence of these kinds of measures?

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, this is the point I have been trying to make, and the parliamentary secretary is absolutely correct.

The province knew when it was going to get the vaccines. It also received professional medical advice from the experts as to what the waves would look like, yet it still chose not to take additional measures.

Absolutely, if vaccines came sooner we probably would not be standing in this place right now, but my point is the provinces knew we would be in this place right now. That is the whole point. They knew we would be here because they knew the trajectory of vaccines, and it has only been better than what they had been promised.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to follow my colleague, the member for Kingston and the Islands. I could have listened to a 20-minute speech by him. The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands also gave a speech that I really appreciated this evening. I will pick up on her speech, as well as the speech just given by the member for Kingston and the Islands. The point of this debate is truly important and they both touched on the theme. I am sure others have, but I am calling these two members out in particular.

Where the member for Kingston and the Islands finished off is where I would like to begin. He spoke about how we can look back at where we could have done things better, where things were done well, where we were a success story or where we need to be better prepared. He and I both came from municipal politics, where there were all these plans in place and after years and years of a pandemic or an emergency not coming, unfortunately, sometimes plans sit on the shelf. I am not saying that is the right approach, but the lessons we are learning are incredibly important and a constant reminder to never take our eye off emergency preparedness.

The member for Kingston and the Islands said that we can look back and do that work, but what has been frustrating in listening, in particular, to Conservative members is all they are doing is looking back. I made note of some of them. One pointed out where we were 52 days ago. My God, how the people of Alberta must feel hearing that tonight. What are we going to do today, tomorrow and the days and weeks after that to support and help the people in this country? We can look back on vaccines, we can look back on whatever else the Conservatives want to look back at, but are we not going to focus our collective energy to support the people in this country now?

I am listening to this debate as a member from Ontario and people in my home province are living it now. I think about the anxiety people felt when these spikes first happened, the confusion, the lockdowns, no lockdowns and the pointing of fingers. I think of my friends, neighbours and family who just want to know how we are going to get through this. That is what our government has been focusing on.

Many members have spoken about no country being perfect, but that does not mean we stop acting. It means we continue to move forward, to provide the supports the provinces and territories need. It means getting vaccines faster, getting the Red Cross out to support the vaccination efforts, if need be. It is seeing health care providers in Newfoundland and Labrador coming to Ontario to help support health care workers. It is seeing people step up in unimaginable ways during this time. It is what else the federal government can do.

As the member for Kingston and the Islands just said, we will work with provinces and territories and provide whatever they need, particularly in Alberta, providing mobile health units, contact tracing, rapid tests, funds for the safe restart agreement to help protect and insulate between the second and third waves, even between the first and second waves. The government has provided whatever each province and territory has needed. Every province and territory in this country is different, has different needs and requires different resources. We have been there. We have heard Quebec members talking about the supports needed in long-term care. We were there for that. We were there for PPE.

We should not be talking about all the things that we have done; we should talk about all the things we are going to continue to do until we are through this. That is what Canadians expect of us. That is what this debate should be about and why I noted the speech of the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. This is the debate we should be having.

Conservatives consistently stand up and say there is confusion and mixed messaging. Nothing has frustrated me more because the confusion and mixed messaging is coming from the Conservatives themselves. They can go back to early March of this year when their own health critic was saying to remove border restrictions, ease the border restrictions, that all they need is a pre-boarding test and then a test when they land and people should just go on their way. If we had listened to them, we would not have caught those people who had tested positive after being tested when they landed. They would not have been in isolation and they would have been out in the community. Again, there are additional measures we can continue to take and we will happily be here to support Canadians to do that.

They are Conservatives who constantly stand in this place and say, “we do not need restrictions, we need freedom”. The member for Carleton posts pictures when he is sitting outside, eating on a patio and goes, “freedom”. Then, they have the nerve to come in this place and say that vaccines would have solved everything when they refused to listen to the public health experts, and not even Canadian public health experts if they do not want to trust Canadians. Globally, we know that vaccines are an important tool, but they will only work if the public health measures are also in place.

The Conservatives love to quote the U.S. or Israel or the U.K. for their programs, but the U.K. and Israel both saw, during their vaccination campaigns, that as they lifted restrictions too quickly they saw spikes. We heard testimony from experts at the health committee. Governments there quickly realized that vaccinations are not the only tool, they have to be done in conjunction with strong public health measures to give vaccinations the time to work, the time to be distributed across the communities and to become effective.

It is this ignorance of listening to the public health advice, which is not governments' opinions but public health advice, that is frustrating to watch because I see people suffering, I see small businesses close and I see people being sick. To send out a message saying that if only we had done this nobody would have suffered is simply unfair to Canadians. We need to be honest with Canadians that as our vaccine campaign is rolling out and everybody needs to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated, we also need to listen to the public health advice. Those mixed messages coming from the Conservatives, saying lockdowns are not needed and looser border measures would be okay are just not truthful, are not helpful and are certainly not going to help the people of Alberta or those in my home province of Ontario or anywhere else across this country as we battle this third wave.

I hope we get to the point where we are having conversations about what more we can do to support Alberta, what more we can do to support any jurisdiction in this country to get through this third wave, and actually acknowledge and admit that the public health measures are there to work in conjunction with vaccines and that we are only going to get through this if we listen to the experts and medical health professionals who know what they are talking about. We have seen it work in other countries, so we do not even need to imagine it; we know it is real. I truly hope that the Conservative members will come and work with us on helping to support our fellow Canadians during this difficult time.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Mr. Speaker, certainly it has been an enlightening evening listening to members of the government, in fact for the first time, acknowledge some of their failures.

I wonder if that member in particular agrees with what the Liberal member for Kingston and the Islands said in the speech just prior. He said that if we had more vaccines, we would not be here in this place. Does that member agree with that statement? I certainly do.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am so disappointed that after my speech the member opposite completely missed the point. Perhaps he does not understand. I cannot assume what he is capable of understanding, but what I just said, my entire speech, was about the importance of vaccines in conjunction with strong public health measures. I challenge him to show me a jurisdiction in the world that got through this COVID pandemic on vaccines alone, without a single lockdown or a single public health measure. If he can show me that jurisdiction, I will come back and apologize. The member did not listen to the speech and is not listening to public health experts. There is no jurisdiction that got through this pandemic with vaccines alone; it has to be both.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I know that the member is not from Alberta and her focus is clearly on Ontario.

I have to say I am extremely frustrated when I sit in this House and listen to the Conservatives blaming the Liberals and the Liberals blaming the Conservatives, back and forth, with me being stuck in Alberta trying to get anyone to do something for Albertans instead of blaming each other, instead of just telling each other they are asking the wrong questions or doing the wrong things.

Will the member commit to sending help to Alberta, not through the Emergencies Act, but to help with our failing Alberta health care system? Will she commit to having her government do that?

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, yes, we are absolutely committed. I give the member my word as well that I will advocate for the supports that are needed. Whatever we need to do, we absolutely need to do to support the people of Alberta and every Canadian across this country.

I agree it can be partisan. I am guilty of that too, because I get really frustrated at some of the misinformation. It really frustrates me to see my own constituents being misled by misinformation, so I get the partisanship, but I do not think this should be a partisan issue. I think we have to get the supports to Alberta, in this case, that are needed. We can go back and point those political fingers and get back to regular business in the House of Commons, but not until this crisis is over. We need to be working together in this moment, if not now, when—

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith.

[Paul Manly, Green, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the one thing that really disappoints me about this debate, and about the ongoing debate on this pandemic, is the partisanship. It does not really matter which political party is running a province; we have all seen problems. Whether it is the NDP in B.C., the Conservatives in Alberta or the federal government, there are issues we need to deal with. We have not acted like a federation during this pandemic, and it is really disappointing. We look at Australia, where there are political differences between the states and the federal government, but they have managed to work it out and get to zero. We have not, and we continue to play this blame game.

I do not have a question. I am just saying I am disappointed. It is hard to listen to this ongoing, toxic, partisan debate.