Madam Speaker, I am very honoured to rise on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay. I will be sharing my time with the member for Vancouver Kingsway.
There has been incredibly beautiful weather in Ontario this week, and I see people out on the streets wanting to believe this nightmare is over. When I was in the market the other night, I saw many young people doing what young people do, hanging out and talking, believing that with leaving winter behind, so too have we left behind the nightmare of COVID, but that is not the case.
We know there are some very concerning new variants. The B.1.1.7 variant is spreading quickly across Canada. We are seeing multiple new cases and health organizations are telling us that this is putting us at the beginning of a third wave.
The crisis of new virulent variants hitting communities across this country happens as we are struggling to get the vaccine rollout. This is a race against time. The United Kingdom has 44 doses administered per 100 people. The United States has 37 doses per 100 people, and Canada is still down at 10 doses administered per 100 people. This is about the decisions that were made and the decisions that are being made.
My hon. colleagues in the Conservative Party were talking this morning about when the border will be opened. On the weekend, they said they did not believe in climate change. Maybe they do not believe in the new variants and that we should open border. We cannot open the border until we get the issue with the vaccines dealt with.
The issue with the vaccines, of course, comes down to the decision made by the government to trust that the private sector would get them through this. The Americans made the decision to invest heavily in vaccine production and research. We did not do that in Canada, and it has put us in a situation where we are behind. We are behind at a time when we cannot afford it because of these variants.
Reopening the economy is incredibly important because we know it has caused massive damage to small businesses and personal economies across this country, but we need to look at how the lack of rights that exist for many workers has exacerbated the crisis. Right now in Peel, there is a situation where 600 cases of COVID have been found at the Amazon warehouse. That is 600 cases.
This is not a flu we are talking about. It has been proven that COVID can have long-term neurological and health damage to people, yet Amazon allowed 600 of its workers to get sick in that plant. It is a number that I do not think has been as staggering anywhere, except at the Cargill plant in High River, where there was also about 600 cases.
Families are affected in Peel, which is continually in the red zone. We heard Doug Ford make it seem like the people in Peel were out partying and not listening to the rules, when the reason Peel has such high rates is because so many people are precarious workers. They work in warehouses like Amazon where they have no choice but to go to work. If we are going to talk about getting the economy reopened, we have to talk about protecting the workers who have been on the front lines and cannot take a day off if they feel sick. There is evidence of people who cannot even get a vaccine because they cannot afford to take a day off work. That is how precarious their situations are.
In Ontario, 15,000 people have gotten sick with COVID because of workplace exposures. There needs to be coherence in saying that to get the economy back on track, we have to shut down this COVID spread in workplaces. To do that, people have to have basic rights to have safe workplaces, and if they need time off when they are sick, they can take time off so they do not make other people sick.
The issue of Amazon is something to look at, because Amazon is the symbol of everything that is wrong in the modern globalized economy. This is a company with 21st century technology and 19th century labour practices. The abuses of workers at Amazon have been documented again and again. I will ask members to remember when all of the Liberals were talking about team Canada, with all hands on deck, and that we are all in this together. At that moment, the Prime Minister shocked the country when he said who the partners would be for distributing medical equipment. It was not Canada Post or Purolator, places that have unions and good working conditions. No, we were going to partner with Jeff Bezos, one of the crummiest human beings on the planet, and make him our partner. What the Prime Minister effectively did was privatize and outsource to Amazon a key element of the pandemic response, and it is not just that Amazon is a crappy company in the way it treats its workers.
While our small businesses were going down in flames across this country, Amazon was literally making out like bandits. Why was that? It is because Amazon does not pay taxes the way small businesses pay taxes. We would have thought the Prime Minister would have seen what a symbol it would have been to stand beside small business owners across the country, compared with standing beside Jeff Bezos, who has a massive tax loophole that has allowed him to become billions of dollars richer.
Two of the worst companies in terms of the profits they made were Amazon and Walmart. They are now $116 billion richer. Amazon and Walmart, by the way, were also two of the companies that gave the least to their employees. There are many big, big corporations whose executives actually said, “Hey, our employees are keeping us profitable. Our employees are going to get a better share.” Costco, certainly a big, big player, gave a fair share, but not Amazon and not Walmart.
Why do I mention that? I mention it because we know that Walmart stayed open through the whole pandemic while all our little small-town stores and businesses were hanging by a thread and the owners were begging for loans because their businesses had to be shut. It is about that inequity.
It is also about the choice that this Prime Minister made to tie himself to Amazon, of all companies, with the abuse of its workers and high injury rates, and the fact that we knew it was not going to protect its workers from COVID. We saw Tim Bray, vice-president of Amazon, quit over the firing of workers in the United States. A vice-president of Amazon quit because workers were fired for asking, in a pandemic, to expand sick leave, hazard pay and child care for the warehouse workers who were trying to keep the business afloat.
The issue of child care was huge because, in the first wave when children had to stay home, workers had to continue to go in, as there was no support for them. The Prime Minister decided that Amazon was the symbol of what was going to make the Liberal government look good in the pandemic. It sent a very wrong message.
What do we need to do? We need to work together at this point to get us through this third wave. I encourage people across this country not to let their guard down. This is the most dangerous point. We have come through two waves. In this third wave, we do not want to have ourselves hit again.
We need the government to have a plan for the vaccine rollout. It has been hiding again and again behind provincial jurisdiction. We saw how the United States brought the army in, and how it had a national strategy to get the vaccines out. We have a Prime Minister who is mister laissez-faire.
I mean no offence to the provinces, but Doug Ford failed the people of Ontario time and time again in not spending the money he should have spent. Regarding Jason Kenney, when everyone else in Alberta was doing their part, his MLAs were on the beaches in Mexico and Hawaii. Now he is using his $30-million war room to pick a fight over the historical accuracy of a cartoon about Bigfoot. Jason Kenney thinks the biggest priority now is that a cartoon about Bigfoot is somehow inaccurate. I know there are a lot of Bigfoots that probably do support Jason Kenney.
I am mentioning Jason Kenney and Doug Ford because we cannot simply leave something as big as a pandemic to them, if that is what their priorities are. We need leadership from the federal government, and we are not seeing it. We need a commitment at the federal level, where we have 180,000 employees, to have the Labour Code say that workers will be able to take time off for sick leave. That is a simple change the Liberal government could make now. If the Liberals did that, it would keep people safe. It would get the economy back up and rolling because we know that if people can take time off when they are sick, they are not going to make other people sick, and it will save us in the long term.
Therefore, I am encouraging my Liberal colleagues and my Conservative colleagues to push for this simple change that we can do at the federal level to make sure that the workers who need to take time off, and we have hundreds of thousands of them under the federal jurisdiction, can actually get the time off. This is so they are not spreading COVID or any of its variants.
