Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.
As always, it is a great honour to stand here as the representative of the people of Timmins—James Bay. This is the day that the old Irish Catholics would tell us is St. Brigid's Day. Why is St. Brigid's Day worth recognizing? This is the day that is halfway between the darkest day of the year and the spring equinox. I would like to think we are past the dark days, but I do not think we are. January was a very hard month, and we are looking at a time in our nation when there are many forces of darkness confronting us: forces of disinformation, a breakdown in civil society and a breakdown in our ability to talk to one another.
As such, it is essential that Parliament—the people's House, the House of Commons, the House of the common people—is open for us to come and debate. There is so much we need to address at this time. Today marks not just the halfway point to the equinox; today marks 27 years that the people of Neskantaga First Nation have gone without clean water. For 27 years, generations have grown up with contaminated water in a community in Canada.
Just over from Neskantaga, at Marten Falls First Nation, the community marks the 111th day that the children of Marten Falls have been unable to go to school because of the chronic underfunding, the poverty and the overcrowding in Marten Falls and Neskantaga.
These are the issues that we should be debating. In our society in Canada, indigenous people are expected to live in degrading circumstances. The thing that is fascinating about Neskantaga and Marten Falls is that they are located in a place that many Canadians have heard of, the Ring of Fire. We hear about the great riches of the Ring of Fire. Doug Ford said he was going to drive a bulldozer to the Ring of Fire. The nation of Canada's focus has always been on getting the resources out of the ground, yet we have children who cannot go to school because of chronic underfunding.
It was very moving in the slowdown and the crisis with omicron during January to hear parents talk about the mental health of their children; the mental health of children in cities, suburbs and small towns; and how we had to be there for our children. We never heard any national conversation about the mental health of the children in a community like Marten Falls, who are denied a universal human right, the right to quality education. They are being denied that.
No, I do not think we are halfway between the darkness and the light. We are still very much in the darkness.
I think of January and the thousand people who died from omicron in Ontario alone. It is a thousand people so far. I think of their families. I think of the front-line medical and health teams that struggle on their shifts to try to keep people alive. I think of the people who are facing delayed surgeries because our ICUs are overrun.
Today, this morning, in North Bay in northern Ontario, there is a gang of thugs outside the health unit in North Bay threatening people. What kind of nation have we become when the notion of freedom is that someone can go and target vaccine clinics? They bragged this weekend that they were shutting down vaccination clinics in Ottawa. What kind of so-called freedom is it to target doctors, nurses and health workers?
I know we are tired. Omicron hit us like a baseball bat. We had all thought we had gotten through it. We thought we got through it while we did not bother to ensure the rest of the world had access to vaccines. Then what came out of the rest of the world was omicron, and we do not know what is coming next.
However, what concerns me most is not so much that we are tired or not so much that we are stressed, but this fundamental breakdown as a nation that we have to confront. When I talk to people about the pandemic, I know the vast majority are tired. They are doing their part and going along, but when I see people dancing on and desecrating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, never in my life as a Canadian could I have imagined that someone would be so ignorant.
What concerns me much more is the number of people who came on my Facebook page to say that it never happened, that it is not true, that it is made up. The disinformation about the situation that we are facing is the real crisis in this country. Here in Parliament, we are not talking about how we find our way through a pandemic but about whether or not we can work together as parliamentarians to try and raise our nation up to find a way through this together, yet some may find that it is politically advantageous. There is one very crafty Conservative MP who came up with the term “vaccine vendetta”, but I actually think it is more of a vendetta against his own leader. What has happened in our country when vaccinations, a solution, medical science and our front-line researchers become targets and the Conservatives can talk about vaccination as a vendetta?
Of course, they are all wrapping themselves in the Canadian flag, walking around with the flag upside down or walking around with the flag desecrated with the swastika, and everyone I have ever heard from this so-called “Freedom Group” tells me that their great-grandfather, grandfather or uncle fought in the war. Well, welcome to Canada; everybody's relatives fought in the war, but they fought for a freedom that is not an individual right to harass and intimidate. They fought for a collective belief that together as a nation, we are different and we are better.
Rather than talk about our veteran grandfathers, I am going to talk about my grandmother, Lola Jane Lindsay MacNeil, from the Ottawa Valley, who worked 12-hour shifts as a nurse. My grandmother was a hard woman with me because she remembered polio, which disappeared just before I was born. I thought my grandmother was raging and angry, but she had been on the wards of the polio children and she understood the importance of vaccinations, so when someone comes on my page and says, “Oh, on the polio vaccine, all they needed was vitamin C”, no, that is false, and we have to call that out.
I urge my colleagues from all parties to rise above this disinformation campaign that is out there and the idea that this is somehow a vendetta or that this is somehow cooked up by the Prime Minister to make everybody's life hard. Yes, it is hard. Suck it up. Grow up. It is has been hard for all of us, but it has been really hard for our front-line medical workers, who deserve better than to see a mob trying to harass them at health units today.
This brings me back to this principle of so-called liberty and freedom. I welcome the protesters on Parliament Hill. That is why Parliament is here. I love the fact that an open Parliament Hill is a place where people can demonstrate for whatever reason they want. If the City of Ottawa decides that Wellington Street is now going to be part of a permanent demonstration, I do not have a problem with that; I just hope the city will allow it when indigenous protesters come. However, what I do have a problem with is the harassment of small businesses on our residential streets and the harassment of people off Parliament Hill. That is not about freedom; that is about intimidation, and we are better than that as Canadians. We are so much better than that, but it means that in Parliament we have to stand up.
In closing, I have been reading Camus again and again. I hear people talk about their right to do this and their right to do that. In The Plague, Camus says that what happens is that there is no more individual destiny; there is only a collective destiny made up of the plague and the emotions shared by us all. Yes, we are frustrated, and yes, we are angry, and yes, omicron has caused massive emotional damage to all of us, but we cannot exploit that. We have to find a way as parliamentarians. I know there are people of goodwill in every part of this chamber who understand that as a nation, as Canada, we have to be that light. We have to say that there is a better way to be. That is the discussion that I am hoping we can have, with respect and support and the love for our people who have suffered so much through this pandemic.
