Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Is he saying people in Brampton did not take the—

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I am really glad my hon. colleague went to the gym, went to swimming lessons and went to restaurants. Meanwhile, racialized workers are dying in the hundreds in the GTA, and they are dying from the new variant strains that are coming out of places like Brazil.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague why, last month, his government was called out at the WTO by South Africa and other third world nations for actively blocking their capacity to build vaccines. The Liberals have this “I'm all right, Jack” attitude to protect the interests of big pharma, while we have new virulent strains that are much more deadly.

Does the member believe that Nova Scotia and its bubble will be protected or that racialized workers will be protected when we do not have vaccine equity? People will continue to die? Why are the Liberals blocking third world—

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I think this is something we need to be talking about in the House. The rise of this anti-vax movement is deeply tied with the extreme right, and that we have idiots like Randy Hillier, a well-known Conservative, and his friend from Hastings—Lennox and Addington, a man who I believe is disgracing the role of a public official, and the fact that they are getting away with it.

Canadians are fed up with this. Canadians know that the extreme right is trying to undermine our health responses for its own needs, and we have to stand up to that. We have to say that it is wrong, and that it is about hate.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I would love it if every Canadian is vaccinated by the May long weekend, but I am not going to go back to the people in my region and tell them the Conservatives said, “Poof, make it happen” and it will happen. Canadians know better.

We do not have the capacity right now to get us to the May long weekend. What the motion should be asking is how we are going to make sure it happens by the summer, what we are going to do and what plans are in place. The idea that we are going to suddenly declare that it is going to happen will not make it thus, and this is my concern here. We need to tell Canadians that we are taking this seriously.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, last March I was very hopeful. I really took the Prime Minister at his word about the team Canada approach, that we are all in this together. We stopped everything every day to listen to the Prime Minister's updates, because we wanted to know, we wanted to be able to reassure people that everybody at Parliament had their back, and that is what Canadians were expecting.

However, I see more and more that we are dealing now with spin, with classic government misinformation, rather than this opportunity that we had to set up a national emergency response, to bring in military experts, health experts, representatives from across the country to say, “What do we need to do and how do we need to do it?” I think that is what Canadians were looking for. Instead, we see a Prime Minister who has a total laissez-faire attitude: “Hey, it's not our jurisdiction. It's the provinces. If they ask us, maybe we'll do something.”

That is not good enough. People are dying. Canadians need to know that their government has their backs, and Canadians do not have that assurance right now.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay. People are very tired. People have come through really difficult times and this third wave is hitting us the hardest of all. People's emotions are stretched, and small businesses are hanging by a thread. We should never have been in this situation where these new variants are causing such havoc, destruction and heartache.

The people of Canada have inspired me so incredibly with their determination and stepping up. People are carrying heavy loads and are not giving in to conspiracy; that is a small, small margin. The average person is doing their part, but COVID is a very hard teacher. COVID is teaching us just how unequal our society is and exposing the hypocrisy of governments that are refusing to step up and show leadership. If we are frustrated at anything, it is the complete lack of a national vision and an international vision to respond to a pandemic that is worse than anything we could have ever imagined.

In this motion today, the Leader of the Opposition has decided he is going to demand that we have everyone vaccinated by the May long weekend, when the Conservatives know it is not possible. What are they doing here? They want a gotcha moment. We do not gotcha moments, and Canadians do not need gotcha moments. We need a plan.

However, we do not see a plan from the Liberal government. At the beginning of the pandemic, our Prime Minister really rallied Canadians. It was going to be a team Canada approach. That is what people wanted. People were willing to do their part. Then Mr. Team Canada started missing game after game, shrugging it off, refusing to deal with the issue of the border closures and refusing to deal with the fact that we do not have vaccine capacity in Canada. While other countries were investing in vaccines, he believed that we could trust the international market and it would look after us. He is the last of the Davos believers, and we are suffering for it today.

When CERB ended, that is when the workers began to die. We pushed the government to put in place a national sick benefits program, which the Liberals laughed at but agreed to. However, it is cumbersome and difficult to use. There are workers and racialized workers dying in horrific numbers while we see the absolute negligence in Ontario of the Doug Ford government.

This is another failure of the Liberals. They do not mind that Doug Ford is looking like a complete buffoon in his negligence, and they are more than willing to say that it is a provincial jurisdiction. There is no national vision. There is no desire to stand up and fight and say that we need to work together.

The enormous capacity of the federal government to offer help and bring together an emergency plan, which the New Democrats asked for, could have addressed the crisis happening in places like Vaughan, Peel and Scarborough. To see hundreds and hundreds of people lining up in the cold to try to get a vaccine in Scarborough shocked me. I never thought I would see something like that in this country.

What we are learning now from the first wave of the pandemic is that 3,700 senior citizens died in long-term care homes in Ontario. The negligence and indifference to their suffering was known, it was documented, and nobody bothered to go in and enforce the rules, and people died. Finally the army had to go in, and it found senior citizens left in diapers. It found senior citizens who were not sick left in rooms with COVID patients.

There was negligence and people died. People died in numbers that are of wartime totals: 3,700 of our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts died from that negligence. We should have learned a lesson, but we did not. There was a belief that we would just carry on and hope we would get through, that maybe all the vaccines would come and maybe we could end the lockdowns more quickly.

Now we are into this third wave, where the people who are dying are the young, the racialized, the indigenous and those in urban centres because they have to go to work. They have no choice. Doug Ford's solution was that he was going to call the cops, stop them on their way to work and make sure the kids could not play in the playgrounds.

We never heard the Prime Minister once step up about what is happening in Peel and Brampton in those factories and the Amazon warehouse, which is a partner of the Liberal government and where 900 people became sick, and say that we have to deal with this as a national disaster. Let us face it, Canada, it is because they are considered disposable people, and the disposable people are the indigenous, racialized people working in these factories.

We lost 13-year-old Emily Victoria Viegas. She should not have died, but her parents had to go to work because Doug Ford and the Prime Minister are arguing about something everybody knows we need, which is a proper sick day benefit. Why are they saving money with this? What it is doing is extending the length of this crisis.

I received my first vaccine the other day, and I was very proud, but I am told I will not get my second dose until August. That is a long time in the life of a pandemic. Canada had the opportunity to produce the AstraZeneca vaccine here and we turned it down. The government opted for the international market. We are falling further and further behind. We are now 33rd globally for doses per 100 people. We are 74th globally for the number of people who are fully vaccinated. When I see the Liberals come into the House and pat themselves on the back about what a great job they are doing, I find that to be an absolute shameful disgrace because it is about the Liberal Party brand, not about the fact that as a federal government they could have been bringing the people together and that we needed an emergency response to an unprecedented catastrophe. That is what this is, a catastrophe.

We also see Canada on the global stage stealing vaccines from the third world because the Liberals blew it here. They took from the COVAX vaccine program. The fact is that Canada has been called out by third world countries for blocking the WTO waiver for them to produce their own vaccines. I would ask the Prime Minister if he, Mr. Davos, Mr. Trust the Global Markets, thinks this pandemic will not come and hit us even harder, with more virulent strains, if the third world is not able to be vaccinated. We are in this crisis right now because of the new strains coming out of places like Brazil. As it stands now, even if we get vaccinated by the end of the year, we will not have worldwide vaccine immunity until 2023. The potential we have seen from this disastrous virus is that it is mutating fast and getting more virulent. The fact that the Prime Minister is using Canada on the international stage to stop the ability of third world countries to produce their own vaccines because he wants to protect the intellectual patent rights of big pharma shows that the Prime Minister is more than willing to put corporate interests ahead of the lives of people, and that will come back to bite Canada in a very concerning and deep way.

What COVID has taught us is this. We hit this catastrophe last March and realized very quickly that within three weeks millions of Canadians would not have enough financial savings to pay their rent. We learned that our trust in global free trade meant that we did not even have the capacity to create PPE and workers were having to go into very dangerous situations on the front lines because Canada could not make its own PPE. When the decision could have been made a year ago to start investing in vaccines, like the company in Calgary that is trying to get Canadian vaccines on the market, we opted to trust international capital to look after us, and it is not looking after us.

We need to bring people together at this time. This third wave could easily become a much more dangerous fourth wave. We need to start putting the needs of Canadians first and respect the incredible suffering and vigilance that Canadians are showing. We need to rise to where the average Canadian is, stop playing these games and get a plan to save lives, particularly now, when we are seeing so many young people die in the factories and warehouses in the GTA.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, the reality is that we are in this probably most brutal of all the waves because of the virulent new strains, yet the Liberal government was the only G7 country to raid the COVAX fund that was supposed to be helping in the third world. The Liberal government is refusing the WTO waiver to allow third world countries to get their vaccines up to par.

How does Canada even imagine that we are going to get through this in the long term if new virulent strains are happening because Canada is blocking at the WTO the ability of third world countries to get vaccines?

[Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, April 27th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I am getting really bad flashbacks to 2005, when Stéphane Dion was standing in the House making the same kind of wild statements about making the world a better place, when in fact there were no standards, there were no plans, and year in, year out our greenhouse gas emissions were rising, as they have been under the Liberals.

Last year, the Liberal government put $18 billion into the oil and gas sector. How is it credible that the Liberals can tell the world they are leading, when they are not putting money into alternatives and continue to maintain the 20th century economy as it was?

[Committees of the House, April 27th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, speaking of Liberal filibusters, we have finally gotten the documents from Victor Li, although his lawyer said that it was WE Charity, or maybe the Kielburger brothers, who answered the committee's questions.

I am very concerned. Basic questions were asked. In his role as CFO, what financial information was requested by the Government of Canada in its decision to order the CSSG? His answer, “I do not know.” What assurance did WE give the government that it could handle the financial load? “I do not know.” That was their CFO. Mr. Li's signature is on the service contract. Why was the contract retroactive to May 5? He does not know. What assurances was he given on May 5 onward that expenses would be covered? He does not know.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about this. This is $500 million-plus that we were going to give to the Kielburger brothers. They just walked in, signed this deal, and yet their CFO cannot answer basic questions about due diligence.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, April 26th, 2021]

With regard to the Canada Infrastructure Bank, since May 2019: (a) what is the number of meetings held with Canadian and foreign investors, broken down by (i) month, (ii) country, (iii) investor class; (b) what is the complete list of investors met; (c) what are the details of the contracts awarded by the Canada Infrastructure Bank, including the (i) date of the contract, (ii) initial and final value of the contract, (iii) vendor name, (iv) file number, (v) description of services provided; (d) how many full-time equivalents were working at the bank in total, broken down by (i) month, (ii) job title; (e) what are the total costs of managing the bank, broken down by (i) fiscal year, from 2019-20 to date, (ii) leases costs, (iii) salaries of full-time equivalents and corresponding job classifications, (iv) operating expenses; (f) how many projects have applied for funding through the bank, broken down by (i) month, (ii) description of the project, (iii) value of the project; (g) of the projects in (f), how many have been approved; (h) how many projects assigned through the bank have begun operations, broken down by region; (i) of the projects in (h), what is the number of jobs created, broken down by region; (j) what is the renumeration range for its board of directors and its chief executive officer, broken down by fiscal year, from 2019-20 to date; (k) were any performance-based bonuses or incentives distributed to the board of directors and the chief executive officer, and, if so, how much, broken down by fiscal year from 2019-20 to date?