Debates of May 19th, 2022

Opposition Motion—Rules and Service Levels for Travel

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

I could hear a few interruptions as well from a few members in the chamber.

The hon. member for Ottawa Centre.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as we look at next steps, we need to keep listening to the advice of public health officials because they are telling us that we cannot rush into ending the requirements for people to get vaccinated or to wear masks, or to ensure we keep a safe distance from each other. I again remind hon. members in this place that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Just because we wish for it to be over, and I am sure everyone wishes that, including me, it is not done yet. We are not fully immune to COVID‑19, and we need to continue to work hard because it is about saving lives. This is not about politics or ideology: it is simply and purely about saving lives. We have to do everything in our capacity. That is what compassionate societies such as ours do to save lives. Therefore, let us make sure that the mandates with respect to travelling and vaccinations are maintained until we feel comfortable that we are all protected.

[Fraser Tolmie, Conservative, Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, SK]

We do feel comfortable.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite heckled to me that he does. It is good for him if he does. Wishing does not make it so, because the scientists and experts around the world have not told us that.

We need to start getting prepared to open up the world and our society as we start to resume our lives thanks to the high vaccination rates and the fact that Canadians stepped up and followed all the rules. We need to make sure we bring back the resources to open our airports, that all government services with respect to passports and the like are fully available, and the government is doing so.

Can we do better? Of course we can do better, and we will continue to do better so that as this pandemic comes to an end we can resume our lives the way we used to live prior to the beginning of this pandemic.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to applaud the member for the performance he just gave. It is interesting that the Liberals who sit here with their masks on during the debates in the House of Commons are the same Liberals who go to receptions all over downtown Ottawa with their masks off, where there are hundreds of people. I would ask my colleague across the way why it is the Liberals wear their masks in the House of Commons, but not when they go to receptions such as the Sir John A. Macdonald one last night? If they are concerned about their safety and the safety of others, why is it okay for them to not worry about wearing their masks in public when they are not on Parliament Hill?

Why is it okay for health officers across the country to say we do not have to wear masks in Alberta, Saskatchewan or anywhere else in the country but on Parliament Hill? Can he tell me what advice the Liberals are following? It is not scientific: It is political, as this member has talked about throughout his whole speech.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I try to do my very best to wear my mask because I want to keep myself safe and I want to keep my family safe. In fact, when my two young children go to school, they wear masks, even though they are not required to. They know better. They are six and 10 years old, and they continue to wear their masks. I do not even have to remind them and they do so because they want to protect themselves, but most importantly, they want to protect others. Do members know who my children talk about protecting? They talk about protecting their grandparents and their well-being.

This is about compassion. This is not about politics. Members opposite can choose to sit in the House and not wear masks. They do so every single day, and that is their call. We will continue to take steps and precautions and we will continue to protect Canadians to ensure that we get through this pandemic safely.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Ottawa Centre for his speech.

I would like to hear what he has to say about the amendment proposed by the Bloc Québécois. We want to replace “immediately revert” to prepandemic rules with “gradually revert” to them.

During the pandemic, I consulted with cultural and tourism organizations in Shefford on various emergency committees. They were calling for predictability. They wanted a clear reopening plan. The government failed to come up with one, making it difficult for many businesses to anticipate what will happen next. Both of these sectors have been hit hard by the pandemic. Now they want to recover from it.

What does my colleague think about the importance of proceeding gradually, while presenting a reopening plan and providing predictability to the cultural and tourism sectors? That is what they are asking for.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I concur with the member opposite. She is absolutely right: We need to develop plans. We need to have predictability and certainty as to the next steps as we come to an end to this pandemic. That is exactly what I was talking about. It is very similar to conversations I had with my constituents in the tourism sector that exists right here in Ottawa: the nation's capital.

We agree that we need to work together to develop those important plans, and I will continue to urge all government ministers to do so. I believe the government has been doing that. We are developing those plans. We need to make sure that we bring resources back into our services that were thinned out during the pandemic so that Canadians can get the services they deserve.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the important point made by my colleague. The pandemic is still very much with us. He made the critical point that vaccines have saved lives here in Canada and around the world, but the reality is that so much more needs to be done to ensure vaccine access around the world and Canada is not doing enough.

We should be supporting the TRIPS waiver. We should be allowing pharmaceutical companies here to work with countries in the global south, such as in Bolivia, to produce vaccines during this pandemic that has proved to be particularly deadly for many countries in the global south.

Does the member agree that Canada ought to be doing more to ensure vaccine justice around the world?

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for finding common ground with what I was saying, which is that the mandates and the requirements for vaccines have saved lives, and we need to ensure that it happens around the world. I want to let the member know that I will continue to advocate for Canada to play an engaged role globally so that vaccines are available around the world and people, especially those who come from poorer countries, have access to this lifesaving vaccine also.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, who I know has a very important speech to give after me.

This is a very timely motion, considering what is going on in our airports across Canada and the fact that many have had the privilege to pair off with a minister to the U.S. I could draw some comparisons to how the U.S. is doing things in light of post-COVID, or endemic COVID, versus how we do it here in Canada.

To be travelling here in Canada, people have to be vaccinated. Let us make that point very clear. Let us look at the way people go through the process. In Saskatoon, I get to the airport and walk into the airport, but I do not have a mask. I have been out and about in the community all weekend without a mask. I do not have one in my pocket and have to run back to my truck to find one in the glove box, because I need one at the airport. I do not need it anywhere else in Saskatchewan, but I need it at the airport.

I find an old mask, dust it off and away I go through security. I show my NEXUS card. In Saskatoon, a NEXUS card does not get people into their own lane. It actually just gets them to the front of the line. That must make the people who have been waiting in line for an hour and a half really happy to watch me walk by them to go to the front of the line—

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

So don't do it.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

That is a good point, but not when you do not have enough time. If you get to my point, Mark, and listen to me, you might get some ideas on how you can improve things—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Order. I want to remind members that they are not to have conversations across the way. I do want to remind the parliamentary secretary not to interrupt parliamentarians when they have the floor. I do want to remind members that they are not to use first or last names of members who are in the House.

The hon. member for Prince Albert.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Madam Speaker, I do apologize for that mistake.

I guess what I am saying is that when people are in a rush to catch their flight, they use their NEXUS card and go through security, but they go through the exact same security process as everybody else. In the U.S., people have a preferred traveller status, so when they go to the U.S. and they have their NEXUS card or a global entry card, they get into a separate line. They put their luggage on the rack, put their jacket on the rack, although they do not necessarily have to take their jacket off, it gets pushed through and away they go.

People do not have to take their liquids out of their one-litre Ziploc bag and put them into a Toronto-approved Ziploc bag. They do not have to take their shoes off. They do not have to take their belt off. They do not have to take their computer out. They do not have to do any of those things, because they have already gone through the security screening process up front. They are not viewed as a threat. It is just like every time people apply for a NEXUS card, which is also a global entry card in the U.S.

Here is an example of what the government could do right now with labour shortages. It could have a specific line for those members, because they are not a risk. They are zero threat. Why would we not take the best practices out of the U.S. and apply them here in Canada to speed up the line? If we speed up that line, we could give more resources to the other lines that are lacking resources at this point in time.

In Saskatoon, as I said, when people go through the screening, first of all, they take their jacket off, they take their belt off, they take everything out of their pockets, they take their computer out, they take the liquids out and put them into the one-litre bag they have to use, and then they go through the screening. Then, they get to the secondary screening. There is one thing we are noticing in the airports. For example, in Toronto, with the new system, I call it the scatter system. People go into a line, right next to four other people, and they put their stuff into their bucket. The bucket goes, and then another person's bucket goes, and another. There is actually four to five times more secondary screening in that process because of how it is going through the system. More people are waiting for their bags at the other end, and they are all scattered.

How is this becoming more efficient and faster? How can this work when people are bumping into each other and going around each other trying to figure out where their luggage is, where their bags are, where their shoes are, where their belt is and trying to keep their pants up while they are doing it? It is craziness at its greatest. We see that here in the Ottawa airport over and over again. There are some little things that could be changed to make this a lot smoother and a lot more efficient, if the Liberals wanted to.

I mentioned the NEXUS card. I go to the gate. I go to board the plane, and I show my NEXUS card. The Air Canada agent says, “Wait a minute, that is an expired NEXUS card.” Yes, I know it has expired. I was told I could use an expired NEXUS card. The agent says I cannot use it for ID. I say that is fair enough and go to apply to renew my NEXUS card. I did it two years ago, and I am still waiting for that interview. I have been online checking to see where I could get an interview done in Canada. I cannot. I live in the Prairies, just north of Saskatoon. Before COVID, I had to go to Calgary or Winnipeg, and now, after COVID, they are saying I would have to go to Buffalo or New York in order to get the interview to get my NEXUS card renewed. Does that make sense? Is that proper planning, knowing that we are going to come out of the pandemic at some point in time? Why is it that way?

Coming through the airport, I have seen lots of things, looking at the way things have been operating. I saw one of the more horrific scenes when I was coming in through Montreal. I walked through Montreal airport and looked at the lineups, and they were outside the door, not a line straight outside the door, but weaving back and forth, going around the counters and out the door, to get through security. I asked the security guard what was going on and why it was that way. He said that some of the workers were unvaccinated so they got fired and could not work, some of the workers were laid off and have not been rehired, and the workers who were there were getting so stressed that they were not showing up for work. They are being overworked. He said they are finding it frustrating. They are tired of people yelling at them, because people are at their wits' end by the time they get to the security screening process. I can understand why they are frustrated and why it is a problem.

People get through that process, and then they get through secondary screening. I was at the gate at 9:30 at night, waiting for my flight at 10:30, and I saw these four ladies running to beat the devil. They were sweating and they were upset, because they had just found out their flight had gone without them. The door had just closed. In fact, they were looking out the window at that plane. They were trying to get back to Toronto to their family on a Sunday night. They could not spend the night. One lady said out loud that she was a diabetic and she did not have any more insulin with her for the evening. They had spent four hours in the lineup. They took it out on that poor agent. They were mad, and rightly so. They were yelling and screaming and demanding action. What could he do? The plane had left.

The reality is that the fault lies with the government. It lies right at the Liberals' feet and it lies at their feet in so many aspects of what is going on right now. The government cannot be proactive on anything. It will not react until the crisis hits such a level that it is forced to react. We knew this was coming. We knew that Canadians were going to start travelling again. There is no question about that. The airlines knew that. If the airlines had been given a bankable schedule, they could have scaled up accordingly. They are doing the best they can to accommodate the number of people who want to travel again. Now the bottleneck is our airports, our airport security and the processes that we have to go through in order to board that plane.

The Liberals could have preplanned that. For example, on passports, the Liberals could have said, “We have a lot of people who have 10-year passports coming up for renewal. Maybe we should start approving and processing passports.” They could have said that a year ago. Maybe they should have had things in place so they would not get bottle-jammed right until now and try to do it all at once.

When I hear people tell me that they get faster service if they go through their Liberal MP's office than they do through a Conservative MP's office, I get very concerned because that should not happen. I have heard of two instances of that happening now.

When I look at that, I think that if they had planned properly, they could have avoided that. If they had properly planned for NEXUS cards being renewed, they could have avoided people not having interviews and waiting and waiting for their interviews. If they had properly planned for bringing the airports back into service, we would not have seen the lineups we have in place today. CBSA would have been able to start hiring and training people sooner if the Liberals had a proper plan. These people do not plan. When they do not plan, what do they get? They get failure, and that is what the government has produced time after time.

What can the Liberals do now? They say they are protecting Canadians and they are following the science. They say it is very important to follow the science, and they think they are doing everything right to protect Canadians, which is fair enough. The Saskatchewan public health officer does the same thing. It is the same with the person in Quebec, in Alberta, in Ontario and in B.C. They are following the science, and they are actually being transparent with the science. They are saying that based on the science they can do this and they are allowed to open it up to this level or that level. We have seen that just lately in Quebec, where they made decisions based on what their needs were to reopen their economy accordingly. It was transparent. People knew what was going on, when it was going to happen and why it was going to happen.

The government will not give us a plan. Not only that, it will not give us the dataset or the points it is using to make the decisions it is making. Then the Liberals wonder why people are suspicious. They wonder why people do not trust them. All they need to do is show some transparency, which the Prime Minister, in 2015, said he would show an abundance of.

With this issue, when it is health-related, why would the government not have transparency? What is the reason the Liberals want to hold back the dataset they are using to make their decisions? There should be no reason. They should be able to do that without any type of qualms. If they showed the dataset and said, “Here is the justification. This is why we have to do what we are doing today”, and showed the science to back that, we probably would not be having this debate today, but they are not. The hypocrisy is that the Liberals are saying that the science says we need to do all this stuff, yet they are letting everything go back to normal and they are not following with it.

Yes, we needed to have lockdowns. I can remember being in the Toronto airport in November of last year, I think, and looking down the hallways. I could have said my name and it would have been echoing through the hallways because there was nobody there. There was nobody travelling. Let us also keep in mind what we did not have then. We did not have any therapeutic treatments. We did not have vaccinations. We did not know what we know today.

There are lots of things the government can do. I will end it there and I look forward to the questions.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons (Senate)]

Madam Speaker, when the member was speaking, in particular earlier on in his comments, at the beginning of his speech, he was focusing on and telling his stories about going through an airport and the various screening and security measures that were there. Then he seemed to suggest that one way to fix the problems that have been associated with the increase in travelling, in particular with some of the rules around COVID, was to drop some of those screening requirements that are there for security purposes. I do not understand where he is going with this. Is he saying to drop the security in favour of trying to move things faster because of the protocols that are there for COVID?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Madam Speaker, I am not surprised the member is confused, but what I was actually saying is that there are best practices in other areas of the world that the Liberals could adopt here to have a more efficient screening process. If people have already gone through the NEXUS process and done their pre-screening beforehand, the chance that they are a risk is very small, so why are we worried about the containers, the shoes, the belts, the jackets or the computers? If somebody had thought through that process, yes, they go through the full screening.

This is the system that is being used in the U.S. The U.S. went through worse terrorist attacks by airplanes than any other country in the world, so if it is good enough for the U.S., should we not at least consider it?

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Madam Speaker, I currently serve on the Standing Committee on Health. Two or three weeks ago, the committee heard from public health officials, including Dr. Tam. We asked her whether she thought that Canada was in the endemic phase of the pandemic, and she told us that she did not think so.

My colleague says that he wants to follow the science, but I think public health officials have a lot more expertise than he does in that area. I would therefore like to ask him whether he no longer has any trust in public health experts.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Madam Speaker, Dr. Tam had some suggestions. What I have to square off with those suggestions is how they square with every province moving forward with the removal of restrictions. How does that square off? If her suggestions are what we should be following, then why is every other province not doing that? Provinces manage our health care system, by the way. It is not the federal government; it is the provinces that manage health care. If they are saying that it is good enough for them and that they are willing to move forward and live with the risks that are associated with COVID, then maybe the national adviser needs to get with them, too.

That is something the public health people need to settle, but I will say that we should look at what is going on in the provinces. We cannot say the provinces are not following the science, because they are.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to talk about this government's inability to deliver basic services. The immigration department has been a disaster for years. There are incredibly long, intolerable delays. We recently saw that the government is unable to issue employment insurance cheques, making people wait three or four months.

Anyone who wants to travel abroad must first have a passport. However, getting one right now takes forever. People are really worried about next year's vacation. Passports have predictable, set expiry dates. How is it that this government is unable to predict that more resources are needed to produce more passports?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Madam Speaker, everybody could see this coming. Everybody understood that 10-year passports were going to come up for renewal this year for the first time. We could have anticipated a lot of the problems we are facing now six months ago, and we could have prepared properly for it, but the government does not prepare unless it is in a crisis. It does not act until it is in crisis mode.

Let us take the Canada Revenue Agency. This is another example where people cannot get through to talk to somebody in person. We are talking about four- or five-hour wait on telephone lines. Then there is Passport Canada. We are going to have four passport clinics in my riding next week, just to help people out. We know they want to travel, so we are going to do what we can to accommodate them. I wish the government would do the same.

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Madam Speaker, just as with most problems in this country, Liberals are the cause. Over the past seven years, it feels like they have removed common sense from the dictionary.

They will try to deny it, and they will try to shift blame. They have blamed out-of-practice travellers for the delays, backlogs and travel-associated horror stories that we see coming out of Canadian airports right now, even for domestic flights. Certainly, their globally outdated mandates, red-tape-bundled policies and general lack of compassion is not at fault.

They are vindictive. They are smug, and their leadership is power hungry. The government is the root of the problem.

If I have not been clear enough already, the rest of the world is moving past the pandemic. Even Canada's provinces have learned to live with COVID, but our federal government has not. This is no longer about safety. It definitely is not about common sense. It is about control. Once the Liberals took control, they did not know what to do with their new-found power, and Canadians have suffered long enough for their half-witted initiatives. It is way past time for Canada to return to prepandemic rules and service levels for travel.

Lack of staff is not an excuse. They have had plenty of time to plan for reopening, just like they have had years to plan for passport renewals, another thing the Liberals have dropped the ball on hard.

I am hearing from many constituents about the delays they are experiencing at the passport office, how people wait for hours in line to get to the door just to be told to go home. They then phone, and the phones ring and ring, but they never get answered. I am also being told that Passport Canada is no longer accepting electronic documents and is telling people to go to their MP's office to print the documents. Where is the common sense in that?

It gets worse. It gets a lot worse, and I wonder who or what the government will blame next for the mistakes this time.

The provinces have dropped their mask mandates, yet federal buildings still require people to wear a mask regardless. People wait in those long lines at passport offices, sometimes for hours, get to the door and then they find out that they are required to wear a mask in order to get service.

When they get inside to find out they need a mask, the federal offices have none to give them and there are none to be found. What is a person supposed to do? People are sharing masks. Multiple people, strangers, are using the same mask because the government refused to have a plan.

I am no doctor, but I am pretty sure that wearing a used mask from someone else is far worse than not wearing a mask at all. It seems like the Liberals prefer to have conflicting, arbitrary rules that cause outrage and confuse people.

Do people want more proof of Liberal political theatrics? The drama teacher in charge is ready to act stern and frighten Canadians into compliance. Afterward, when the cameras are all turned off, he is happy to rip off his mask, smile, socialize and jet set around the world just as though restrictions no longer exist. There is one set of rules for the people in power, and one set of rules for the rest.

The rules are different for people like Julie from my riding. She did the responsible thing. She applied for her family's passports months in advance of their trip, but since then, Service Canada has delayed responding to her inquiries, sent her for new passport photos multiple times and told her that she needs to pay $95 per person just to speed up processing times.

The government is using backlogs caused by its own incompetence to extort Canadians who played by the rules. It is simply shameful and unbelievable, and again, there is no common sense. If members thought that passports was a wild ride, it gets far worse.

Let us take a look at what the Liberals have been doing to boaters. Southwestern Ontario is bordered by the Great Lakes, and my riding of Lambton—Kent—Middlesex sits on the beautiful southern shores of Lake Huron. Other parts of my riding are along the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair.

As boating season starts, boaters are wanting to go across the river to Michigan. Before the pandemic, the number of small vessel reporting sites was 400. That number has now been cut to 84. As boating season opens up, boaters will have to travel out of their way to report their vessel.

Do members not believe me? Constituents like John have written to me to say that, instead of taking their boat across an 800-metre wide river to get to and from my riding and Michigan, the CBSA wants them to reroute for 76 kilometres round trip just to check in. This is ridiculous.

John has calculated that it would cost him over $1,200 per trip just to meet this requirement. He has even calculated that this will create an extra 1,140 kilograms of carbon emissions just for one trip for him. The hypocrisy is that the government is pretending to care about the environment and Canadians but, in practice, it is needlessly adding emissions.

I just found out, minutes ago, that the government actually announced that it is going to reopen those reporting sites, but that is only after Conservatives pushed it for common sense and to lift these restrictions from the boaters.

Federal restrictions are being made and enforced without common sense. These mandates unfairly punish Canadians, and the government is giving no indication that it will ease off any time soon. It has consistently missed the mark on marine travel, from Walpole Algonac Ferry in my riding, which was shut down due to marine transportation not being included in cross-border travel exemptions earlier this year, to those recreational boaters who are not going to have points of access entry this spring. Canadians are being left behind. Continuing temporary closures for over two years is unnecessary, costly and irresponsible.

When I previously asked the minister if they will allow CBSA's regular points of entry to be reopened, he laughed. I will spell that out again: Liberal ministers are laughing at the pain they are causing Canadians. They are taking joy in the prospect of crippled tourism and empty rural small town shops during what would normally be a busy season and the busiest time of the year, which will hurt small businesses in communities such as Mitchell's Bay, Port Lambton, and Wallaceburg. This is not a joke.

The behaviour displayed by these ministers was despicable and very telling of how little a priority the concerns of my constituents are to the Liberal government.

Did members know that Canada is the only country in the world where non-vaccinated people are not allowed to travel domestically? Let that sink in. That is not okay. Requiring a type of passport for Canadians to travel domestically, creating second-class citizens, needs to end. The government is going out of its way to punish fully vaccinated travellers, no matter if they cross by land, sea or air.

I have had personal experience with this when waiting in line for security at airports, watching people struggle with delays and fighting the mandatory use of the barely functioning ArriveCAN app, something that the government insists on using.

Remember how I mentioned earlier how it would only take paper documents? Well, now it wants an app, something that is totally digital, which is another decision that spits in the face of common sense-loving Canadians.

Liberals refuse to compromise. They will not give people the choice to use paper or electronic documents. That would make too much sense.

At the land border crossings, what is happening late in the evening? Well, there is one overworked stall that is still open. Americans do not know about the ArriveCAN app when they are crossing and the requirement to use it. The government has failed to explain to them and to advertise to would-be border crossers of this requirement. This makes for frustration and delays for tourists coming to support our economy and for Canadians returning home.

For example, I spoke with a senior couple in my riding who are fed up with how little is being done to help them. They are in their 80s, and they are very cautious. They care about the rules, and they want to try to follow them. They asked their son for help to buy a phone, their very first smart phone, something that they were forced to buy, because they were excited to resume day trips across the border.

When they put the ArriveCAN app on, it was not working and they did not know what to do. They told me that they took time and drove down to the store to see if the young clerk could help them. Unfortunately, though, they all tried, and it still did not work. They returned their new phone, they shelved their excitement and returned home wondering why the government would make visiting loved ones for a day so hard for them.

I know that Conservatives are asking for the Liberal government to do something that is very difficult for them, which is to finally adopt some common sense and listen to Canadians instead of to themselves. People want their lives back and one way to start giving them this is to return to prepandemic rules and service levels for travel.

Everything the government touches is an absolute failure. On behalf of all Canadians disappointed with how their plans are being ruined, I will ask this: If Canadians do not have a smart phone, can they get a smart government, or at least one with common sense?

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Madam Speaker, I was listening to the hon. member across the way, trying to sort through the obviously emotional comments she was making about the frustrations she is feeling about the pandemic, frustrations that, indeed, many Canadians are feeling.

I wonder if the member could comment on, post pandemic, what the role of masks might play in preventing other diseases that might be passed from person to person?

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Madam Speaker, we continue to follow the health advice of the provinces. The provinces have medical health officers, and they are in charge of health care in this country.

My question to the member opposite and to the government, actually, is this: What information do they have that they are not telling the provinces? Why do they still have mask mandates in federal buildings when the provinces have removed restrictions everywhere across this country? I am sure Canadians would like to see that information to know if they are hiding something from Canadians and from our public health officers in the provinces.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Madam Speaker, I really appreciate a lot of the comments from my colleague. I too share her frustration. I mean my office right now is getting absolutely inundated by calls from people who are waiting for their passports. As well, the time that they are waiting at airports is completely unacceptable. We know that none of this is a surprise. People were planning on travelling as soon as the travel restrictions eased.

Can my colleague speak to how important it is for the government not only to hire staff but to ensure that the public service is fully resourced and that employees of the public service are paid good fair wages, especially in a labour market shortage like right now?