Debates of Nov. 15th, 2022

Government Business No. 22

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Madam Speaker, I think it is shameful that not only did the member think that it was appropriate to mention who may or may not have been in the House, but also that he is imputing false motives on members.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

That is debate.

The hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes is rising on another point of order.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Madam Speaker, with respect to the point of order raised by the member for Kingston and the Islands, my role at that time was simply—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I did indicate that the member is not to indicate who is in the House and who is not in the House. Therefore, I am going to allow the debate to continue because the hon. member is raising a point of debate and not a point of order.

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

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

Madam Speaker, I do not even really need to say much more, other than that the people watching at home have witnessed what just happened in this House. They are seeing first-hand on their TV screens, or wherever they happen to be watching this, the games that Conservatives will play and, guess what, the Bloc Québécois is right there with them playing these games, too.

If anybody in this House really needs a reason as to why we need the motion that we are going to vote on later this evening, they need look no further than the games that the Conservatives and the Bloc are playing while I am speaking. That is the reality of the situation. They can laugh and chuckle and give me the thumbs-up like they are doing, but it is very clear what is going on.

I will go back to where I started, and that is this obtuse idea that the Conservatives are somehow trying to suggest that there is less democracy as a result of sitting late. I am sorry, but if Conservatives thought when they were elected that this was a nine-to-five job, they were mistaken. I would encourage—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

There seem to be some discussions going back and forth. I do not have my speakers on, but the hon. member has a boisterous voice and I can still hear the heckling and discussions going on. I would remind members that if they want to have conversations, they should take them outside. If they want to heckle, I would ask them to wait until it is time for questions and comments. They will have a better opportunity to be heard at that time.

The hon. parliamentary secretary has one minute to finish his speech before we get to the interesting part of questions and comments.

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

Madam Speaker, I was just going to conclude by saying that if Conservatives thought when they were elected that this was a nine-to-five job, they were mistaken. I am sure there are a lot of opportunities for them to have a nine-to-five job and contribute to society in a way other than being in the House, and perhaps they want to explore those opportunities, but the reality of the situation is that democracy does not end at five o'clock. This is not a nine-to-five job, and we have to be prepared to work later into the evening when it is going to directly benefit Canadians, which is the reality of a lot of the measures that have been brought forward this fall alone that the Conservatives have routinely held up.

I hope my Bloc friends, who sometimes can see the light, can come around on this issue, see the importance of this and vote in favour of it, because I know this is what Canadians and Quebeckers are expecting of them.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to correct the record, because the parliamentary secretary said a number of things that are not true.

First of all, I am certainly a hard-working individual, and I do not mind working as many hours as are needed to get the job done.

He said that the opposition has only one tool, and that is delay, when there is a bill that it feels is not going to be good for Canada, but there are just so many terrible pieces of legislation being brought forward. However, I would point out that Conservatives are not obstructing. In fact, we voted to move Bill C-30 quickly to committee. We voted to move the conversion therapy bill right through first, second and third reading. On truth and reconciliation, it is really rich, when the Prime Minister goes surfing on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, that Liberals could say we are trying to be obstructionist.

Would the member agree that he needs to correct the record?

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

Madam Speaker, if I were to take the member at her word in what she is saying, that Conservatives are genuinely using that delay tool only for the purpose of bills they are in opposition to, she would then have to explain to me why they delayed Bill S-5 and forced the government to add more and more days so they could speak to Bill S-5 and never even scratch the surface of talking about the bill.

If the member wants to find one or two bills that they happened to move along a little more quickly to try to somehow justify their actions, it certainly does not sit well with those who are watching, looking at this holistically and realizing that what Conservatives have been doing routinely is delay, delay, delay.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Madam Speaker, I found it very amusing just now when this part of the House emptied out, and suddenly, we saw the other side of the House come in. Now we know what was needed to make the Liberals come to work in the House. All it took was a call for quorum. To me, it was like lifting up a rock. I think members will understand the image.

I find it a little insulting to hear the Bloc being called lazy. We are always ready to work. We are there for our constituents, and we come to work when we are asked to. If the House decides to extend sitting hours to midnight certain evenings, we will be there and we will be there in person. I challenge my Liberal colleagues to also be there in person.

That said, I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary a question. Let us say that we could justify extending sitting hours until December 16. Why do they want to extend them until June, the end of the spring session? What reason could there be for applying this measure in February, March, April and May? I would really like to have a sensible answer to this question.

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

Madam Speaker, I am sorry if the member finds something insulting. What I find insulting, quite frankly, is that when we are trying to participate in debate, which is the reason we come to this House to represent Canadians, Conservatives and the Bloc, by the member's own admission a few moments ago, would decide that it is funny to stand up and walk out of the room in order to force a quorum call.

Is that why he thinks people elected him to come here, to play little games like that and skirt around procedural rules? Does he really think that is what his purpose in this House is?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, on the subject of quorum calls, I was troubled to see the other night during a quorum call that it was clear there were members in the lobby who did not come out. I looked at the Standing Orders, and we have no standing order that requires a member of Parliament who is within a few steps of the chamber to show up when there is a quorum call.

Would the hon. member agree with me that PROC should have a look at this to see whether we should add to our Standing Orders that when there is a quorum call, the assumption when those rules were written was that any member who was ambulatory would get in and get to their seat, because there was a stronger sense of duty in those days? I wonder if we should have PROC look at it.

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

Madam Speaker, we should certainly be looking at this issue. It is also important to reflect on the fact that the Conservatives are not just doing it to the Liberals. They are doing it to the Green member too. I was here that night, when they did the exact same thing to her in the middle of her speech.

Should we look at a way to try to resolve this issue? Yes, I think we should, or we could just expect everybody to be adults and not play those games.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Kingston and the Islands for sharing his time with me. That was very kind of him.

Voters did not elect a majority government. Had they wanted to, they would have done so in 2019 or 2021, but they did not. They chose a minority government. However, the current false, hybrid, patchwork majority is an unholy alliance resulting from the NDP's renunciation of its fundamental values in exchange for a promise.

I have some advice for my NDP friends. They should be aware that all of the promises this government makes are for the future, which is understandable, but of course it makes them in the conditional form, never in the present tense. It is important to be aware of that because there is a good chance that many of these promises will end up in the graveyard of good intentions.

An intention is a promise that is not strong enough to be achieved. An intention is basically a false promise. When someone says that they had good intentions, their intentions were not good enough because they never resulted in action.

Government Business No. 22 is what I would describe as a rogue motion. It is a hold-up of democracy.

The motion shows that the current government does not like to govern with an involved Parliament. To avoid having to do so, it does not hesitate to violate the spirit of the rules of the House. Let us not forget that these rules are the culmination of the past wisdom of previous governments. Government Business No. 22 is detrimental to the legitimacy of the government.

Some claim that Parliament is currently ungovernable. Ungovernable, no, unpleasant maybe, but not ungovernable. The government has introduced 36 bills, 19 of which have gone through every stage, 16 of those received royal assent and three are at the Senate; seven bills are being studied at committee, 10 others are at second reading, and so on. Thirty-six bills is not bad. It is not ungovernable. Things might not be going at the pace that some would like. That may be unpleasant.

Why does the government want to muzzle the opposition? It claims this is urgent. Urgency is a convenient pretext. Philosophically speaking, urgency does not exist. It is simply a characteristic that individuals choose to assign to an event. Urgency does not exist.

Here, the person who chose to assign that characteristic to the event is the Leader of the Government. Urgency is subjective, not objective. Urgency is something that is decided, it is our own view. The Bloc Québécois does not agree with this subjectivity.

Subjectivity is about the subject, it is about the individual examining something. The thing I am examining is an object. It is said to be objective. Clearly, depending on where I am in relation to the object, it will have one hue rather than another. It is an interpretation, not the truth. Therefore, urgency does not exist. The only justification that I can see for Government Business No. 22 is an open devotion to ignoring the Standing Orders. The motion will prevent members from discussing issues together because not everyone will be there. Ultimately, having discussions together is the very essence of parliaments.

Government Business No. 22 will force us to give monologues and not have dialogue, and yet, dialogue is the only way to build an objective and not a subjective argument. I will repeat that this motion is a hold-up of the House and its activities. Why are they doing this? Why are they moving a motion such as this?

Everyone here knows that there is no point in asking “how” without asking “why”, so I have to ask, why? The only valid answer I have found in my heart of hearts and in consultation with my eminent colleagues is that the government prefers to govern in absentia, as they say in Latin, leaving members to fill the void in the evenings, at the whims of the government House leader and another party's House leader, I might add. I cannot imagine who the leader of the other party will be, but that mystery should be solved soon.

Of course, as parliamentarians, it is our job to sit. I am not arguing that. Our work is planned so that we can put forward our respective points of view. Sittings cannot be improvised at the whim of the government House leader. In 1982, the House adopted the principle of a sessional calendar. It cannot be flouted at every sitting. Government Business No. 22 allows the government to do indirectly what it cannot do directly.

Those are very wise philosophical words. I do not remember who said that; it could have been Plato, Aristotle or Martin Champoux. I am sorry, I should have said the member for Drummond.

Anyway, Motion No. 22 is an unethical decision based on the interest of one, not all. Motion No. 22 disregards the public interest by cutting off debate rather than enabling dialogue. The purpose of a parliament is to bring people together, to foster dialogue, to be constructive. Motion No. 22 says no to all that.

I listened to the member for Kingston and the Islands' passionate speech, and I look forward to hearing members opposite defend the indefensible, because Motion No. 22 is indefensible.

I will end there. I am happy to answer questions.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Madam Speaker, I understand my colleague's concerns with moving time allocation and moving forward on this, but I am curious. It was not very long ago that the Bloc supported time allocation on Bill C-10, when we were debating that in the House, when we were seeing the Conservatives do everything they could to stop the important work that needed to be done for Canadians, to make sure that Canadian broadcasting was protected. We were updating our broadcasting legislation. At that point, the Bloc supported time allocation.

It seems like the Bloc members are saying it is a massive overreach but also that it is a massive overreach they can support when it is in their interests. I am wondering how the Bloc members square that circle.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for that excellent question.

It is important to distinguish between an exception and a precedent.

An exception is something that happens only once and must not happen again. That is what happened with Bill C‑10 because there was so much pressure from Quebec's cultural sector, and protecting that culture was the right thing to do.

A precedent is something that has already been set; it is there, we see it, and it will happen again. This practice should not be allowed to happen again, period.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for his speech.

Is he concerned that committee work will be disrupted as a result of this motion?

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for her excellent question.

We cannot immediately gauge all the negative effects that could arise, but we do know that there is a possibility that committee work will be disrupted, which would be unfortunate.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, we should look at the core of what we are debating today and think about it. Opposition members often say that they want to have more time to debate legislation. If this motion passes, it will provide additional hours for members of Parliament to debate. The opposition is asking for more time and we are giving them exactly that, so that more MPs will be able to speak.

Can the member speculate as to why the Conservative Party would oppose such a motion?

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, I cannot answer the member for Winnipeg North on behalf of the Conservative Party. However, I will respond on my own behalf and on behalf of the Bloc Québécois.

We could be grateful for the amount of time we are allotted, but what we need in order to build the society we want is quality time. For me, here, quantity is not as important as quality.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Madam Speaker, I will be brief. I would like to ask for an apology from the member for Trois‑Rivières, who made the mistake of referring to me by my name rather than by the name of my riding of Drummond. I was thinking of rising on a point of order, but I will let it go this time.

I wanted to raise the issue of our interpreters' schedules in the context of the decision that the government is preparing to make with the help of our NDP colleagues. There will definitely be repercussions on the work and the schedules that we need to organize with the House of Commons interpreters.

What is more, the government has decided to apply this measure until June 23, which includes all of the winter and spring months. I would like to hear what my colleague from Trois‑Rivières has to say about that because, earlier, the member for Kingston and the Islands chose not to answer my question.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Drummond for his question.

It seems excessive, unjustified and unjustifiable to apply this measure until June 23. One of the negative consequences that was mentioned earlier is the fact that the work of committees will be compromised, but there are others.

Members were elected to sit and that is what we will do. However, quite honestly, this measure places a pointless and unwarranted burden on other staff, such as the pages, interpreters and other House employees.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here we are again with another draconian motion by the Liberal government. I have been a member of Parliament for seven years, and I want to talk a bit about the history of the Liberal government trying to shut down debate and shut down scrutiny at committee. Let us start at the very beginning with Motion No. 6.

Motion No. 6 is the identical motion to the motion we have here, and in between, there was another motion that was very similar as well, Motion No. 11. If anyone gets the mathematical irony, Motion No. 22 is twice as bad as Motion No. 11.

In the short time I have, I want to rebut something the member for New Westminster—Burnaby said in his speech. He talked about how he is going to support this great motion and called out other parties. On May 19, 2016, the CBC reported that the member said the motion was fundamentally anti-democratic and showed a greater disrespect than we had seen developing for weeks. That is what the member for New Westminster—Burnaby said in 2016, so I am not sure when the moral compass was lost or what is different when the motions are so similar.

Let us go back in time to 2016 with Motion No. 6. I will set the stage. There was the MAID, medical assistance in dying, legislation and the courts had prescribed a date by which it was due. The government was very angry that numerous amendments had to be brought because the legislation was so terrible. We were there to vote on these multiple amendments. It was not starting as quickly as the Prime Minister wanted it to start and he became very angry. He came over and grabbed the late Gordon Brown and tried to shove him, but he accidentally “elbowgated” another member, Ruth Ellen Brosseau. That was the introduction of the first draconian motion, and we see that bad behaviour continues.

Then we get to Motion No. 11, forcing folks to sit until midnight, but not everybody. Nobody in the NDP or the Liberal Party had to show up. They could be in their PJs in their beds. They just wanted to keep the opposition busy talking without an audience until midnight night after night. Obviously, I do not have an issue talking until midnight. However, I am being told that I have to stop talking now.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Chris d'Entremont]

When we come back to the motion, the member for Sarnia—Lambton will have seven minutes to express her thoughts.

It being 5:30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of Private Members' Business as listed on today's Order Paper.

Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Act

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

moved that Bill C-293, An Act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, as of today, we have lost over 45,000 Canadians to COVID, and millions of people around the world have died as a result of COVID. It has upended our lives in so many different ways, from isolation to school closures. It has upended businesses and caused major economic disruptions, reverberations that we still feel with difficult inflation and interest rate hikes that are challenging many households. The global impact on poverty rates and the upending of education around the world will have long-lasting and negative effects.

There was the increasing debt that governments around the world rightly took on to address this crisis in many respects. Both public and private debt also come with consequences. Fifty-seven per cent of Canadians whose debt increased attributed the increase to COVID. As a parliamentary intern in my office put it, even having just lived it first-hand, it is hard to wrap our heads around what we just experienced.

What can and should we do about all of that? What lessons should we learn? We have to be specific and clear, and put a framework in place to make sure we do not lose these lessons. Simply put, the message of this bill is that we need to learn the lessons from this pandemic in order to prevent and prepare for the next one. No, we are not done with COVID, but we have also lived through enough to learn from our pandemic response across all levels of government, and those lessons should inform our plans going forward.

What does the pandemic prevention and preparedness bill do? It does three things. First, it establishes a review of our COVID response, not just from the federal government's perspective but across all levels of government. The goal is to be comprehensive. Just to comment briefly on the scope of the review, the bill notes:

In conducting its review, the advisory committee is, among other things, to

(a) assess the capability of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Department of Health to respond to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic before and during the pandemic;

(b) in collaboration with provincial and municipal governments, assess the public health and pandemic response capabilities of those governments;

(c) assess the effectiveness of the exercise of powers under any applicable federal laws before, during and after the pandemic and of the coordination of measures taken under those laws; and

Importantly, and this is the broad element to bring to bear on lessons learned:

(d) analyse the health, economic and social factors relevant to the impact of the pandemic in Canada.

There has to be a review if we are going to learn the lessons of our government's response and the response of all governments.

How do we take those lessons and put them into a framework where we are going to see accountability, transparency and action on a going-forward basis? The second thing the bill does is it requires the Minister of Health to establish a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan. It is modelled on climate accountability legislation.

To my knowledge the first piece of climate accountability legislation that I reviewed was from a Conservative government in the U.K. in 2006, and we now have such a framework in place here in Canada. This bill takes a similar approach to say there has to be a transparent and accountable framework by which a government is obligated to table a plan to Parliament, to the Canadian public, and then update that plan on a regular basis. The bill suggests every three years. I went back and forth between three and five years. I think five years would be appropriate as well.

It obligates the Minister of the Health to establish a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan and to table a report. The bill sets out a long list of factors. This is where it was quite difficult actually, because I was drawing from a great amount of expertise out there, from the United Nations Environment Programme's report on preventing future pandemics, from IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and their workshop reports in relation to pandemic risk and how we prevent future pandemics, and certainly from the independent panel. It has a series of reports now on preparedness and response at the national level and also at the global level, and how we could strengthen those responses at all levels.

Taking those expert reports, and in consultation with some of the researchers behind those reports and certainly with Canadian health experts as well, the bill sets out a series of factors that the Minister of Health must consider in developing a plan. I am sure I missed some elements, which is partly why it is so important to get a bill like this to committee. The committee could, I hope in a non-partisan way, say what does not make sense or whether something was missed or how we could get it to the best place possible as a matter of what should be in or out of a plan as the health minister considers it.

As a starting point, obviously enough, what the health minister should do is identify the key drivers of pandemic risk and describe how Canadian activities, domestic and abroad, contribute to the risk.

We focus a lot in this House and, frankly, in the Canadian public around preparedness strategies, and that is part of what this bill would do as well. We do not talk enough about prevention, but we know that the costs of prevention are a small fraction of the significant human and economic costs of living through a pandemic. Therefore, there has to be a real strong focus on prevention.

There also has to be a commitment to ensure collaboration at all levels of government, because it is not enough in our federation for the federal government to take action on its own. Similar to climate action, and certainly with respect to mitigating pandemic risk and to preparing for pandemics, it cannot all be on the federal government, and we have learned that. It is unquestionably a lesson we have learned in the course of the response to COVID. Therefore, the bill would require the Minister of Health to ensure sustained collaboration between the Minister of Health, provincial governments and indigenous communities in the development of the plan, in order to align approaches and address any jurisdictional challenges.

Now, I probably could have been a little clearer with the language here, but the bill would also provide for training programs, including collaborative activities with other levels of government. What I had in mind there, and I think a committee could improve this, was simulation and table-talking exercises. It is not enough to have a piece of paper with a plan written down. We have to put that plan into action and learn where there are gaps in the plan. Where jurisdictional challenges arise, they can be addressed through a simulation exercise rather than as we live through a real-life pandemic.

Now, a critical element here, when we draw from the literature, is that the plan has to be based on a “one health” approach. For those who do not know what a “one health” approach is, it is a relatively simple idea, although it can be a challenge sometimes in how we apply it, because of how holistic it is. It is this idea that we cannot pull apart human health, animal health and environmental health, that these are interconnected ideas and we have to think of them as one health.

We know this, and if we read the literature from the United Nations Environment Programme, from IPBES or from any number of experts, including Canadian experts in zoonotic diseases, they will tell us that zoonosis presents the greatest risk in relation to pandemics. Taking deforestation as an example, the spillover risk that can occur when humans are obviously going to come into closer contact with animals as a result of that deforestation creates not only a challenge to the environment, as it is a question of environmental health, but also then a question of human health, because of that spillover risk. When we run down a list of factors, and there are different reports on this, overwhelmingly the focus has to be on a “one health” approach.

I will read from the United Nations Environment Programme, which states:

This report confirms and builds on the conclusions of the FAO-OIE-WHO Tripartite Alliance and many other expert groups that a One Health approach is the optimal method for preventing as well as responding to zoonotic disease outbreaks and pandemics.

Therefore, there has to be a focus on a “one health” approach.

There also, of course, has to be a whole-of-government approach. It is not enough for the Minister of Health to work up a plan. The Minister of Health has to work with other ministers, break down silos in the federal government and ensure that we are putting ourselves on the best footing we possibly can to prevent and respond to future pandemics. The Minister of Industry has a role to play in terms of ensuring that we have vaccine manufacturing capacity and manufacturing capacity for essential treatments and tests. There is a role for the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Transport to play with respect to border controls. There is obviously a role for the Minister of Foreign Affairs to play with respect to global health equity, which is an issue that, unfortunately, we have, as wealthier countries, utterly failed on in a serious way in the course of this pandemic. There also ought to be collaboration, and this is in keeping with that idea of a “one health” approach, with the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Environment.

Therefore, if we think of a framework that already exists within the Government of Canada, a “one health” approach with respect to antimicrobial resistance, it is a partnership between the Department and the Minister of Health and the Department and the Minister of Agriculture, because we know, certainly in other countries around the world, that the increase and overuse of antibiotics can create the risk of superbugs. There are researchers at McMaster who call it the “silent pandemic”, referring to the number of lives that have already been taken by AMR. As I have said, it is a whole-of-government approach.

I will say that this has to be a focus of the committee when it looks at the series of factors, ensuring that it gets sustained collaboration with the provinces, because we need to make sure, for example, that there are preparedness strategies for public health services, including the protection of vulnerable and marginalized populations. That will be as much a provincial question as it is a federal question. The working conditions of essential workers across all sectors is as much a provincial issue as it is a federal issue.

The availability management of relevant stockpiles, including testing equipment and PPE, is more of a federal issue, but we have seen challenges at times at the provincial level as well.

There is the search capacity of the human resources required for testing and contact tracing, because we cannot have the human resources at the ready at all times. We need to be able to stand them up to meet the surge, and again the provinces and the federal government will need to work hand in hand on this.

There are a series of other factors, and I will not go into all of them. I want to mention the seven key disease drivers identified by the United Nations Environment Programme.

First is an increasing demand for animal protein, because we understand the spillover risk and lack of biosecurity, especially with increased demand in low and middle-income countries. It is a real challenge that needs to be addressed.

Second is unsustainable agricultural intensification.

Third is the increased use and exploitation of wildlife. If we look at the live animal markets around the world, they have presented challenges, including likely in the course of the crisis we have just lived through.

Fourth is the unsustainable utilization of natural resources, accelerated by urbanization and land-use change.

Fifth is travel and transportation.

Sixth is changes in the food supply chains. Traceability challenges are the issue there.

Seventh is climate change.

These are major twin risks. Climate change is an existential risk in and of itself, but it also drives pandemic risk. That is not to say we can eliminate travel, and we are not going to eliminate agriculture, but how do we look at these industries to find best efforts to reduce and mitigate pandemic risk to prevent a future pandemic? How do we make sure there are regulations in place so we can prepare for future pandemics as well?

I suppose the last item that I want to close off with is that there needs to be accountability in any particular role here.

One, the bill establishes a review, the lessons learned.

Two, it requires some detail about what ought to be in that plan. I have gone into this in some detail, and there is greater detail in the bill. I hope it can be a collaborative exercise at committee, because I want this to be a non-partisan exercise in getting it right.

Three, we need to make sure that we appoint a national pandemic prevention and preparedness coordinator to oversee and implement the plans, so there is proper accountability and an office for seeing this through.

Lastly, I want to close with this idea, because I think it is a relevant one. We forget crises in politics. We deal with them and then forget about them. Over time we saw this with SARS. We cannot go through another situation where 20 years from now we look back at a debate like this one or a pandemic prevention and preparedness plan that we developed in the year 2022 or 2023 that has been sitting on a shelf and has not been updated or implemented. The idea here, very much as a matter of accountability, is to ensure that all future governments, regardless of political stripe, take this seriously, renew their focus on pandemic prevention and preparedness, and make sure we do not lose sight of the lessons learned and do not live through something like this ever again as a society. I cannot overemphasize this: The costs of a pandemic like the one we have just lived through are so incredibly significant, and the costs of prevention and preparedness are a very small fraction of that.

I hope there is all-party support for getting this to committee to improve it, to bring amendments to it and to see it through.

I appreciate being given this time today.