James Cumming

[Canada Labour Code, May 6th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today virtually to speak to Bill C-220 to amend the Canada Labour Code regarding bereavement leave.

This bill reflects the important work that we can all do on issues that are important to so many Canadians. I would like to personally thank the member for Edmonton Riverbend. He should be recognized and commended for his work on this bill. What piqued my interest in this bill was the member's heartfelt interest in the struggles of families as they deal with the care of their loved ones and the grief after they pass.

This bill has received the support of all parties, which highlights that no matter where we stand on an issue, issues like this are important to all. This bill addresses the difficulty and the tragedy that people go through when they lose a loved one and the caregiving they experience leading up to that time.

One thing I learned from my short time in the House, and something I would like to commend the Speaker for, is that he has told us from time to time to speak from the heart. That is what I will do today, because this is a very personal bill for me.

My family lost a loved one. I lost my son two months ago. He lived his life, a very full life, with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. My wife was the principal caregiver. She was not the principal caregiver for days or months, but for years. I cannot explain enough how difficult that is for a family, a parent, to look after a child who has declining health. We are just one example of the many families out there.

Good friends of mine have a mother now in the late stages of MS. The family are collectively looking after this person. They have caregivers who come and go, but the one thing I tell people is that when these families have a caregiver helping them, they are always waiting for the knock on the door when someone will come and tell them their help is needed because something has gone wrong. That is something these families live with when they are trying to give this compassionate care.

I can tell members from personal experience that one can put everything into the care of a child and when that child passes, it does not end. This bill goes a small way toward trying to give some relief to those families. It is an extra week. I can say that it has been two months for me and not a day goes by that I do not think about my son. I know it is the same for many families out there, and it does not matter what the illness is or what someone has been treating. That is a fact of life. When we lose someone, it does not expire in two weeks. It does not expire in three days.

Many have spoken about the impact this has on families. That is why I commend the work of the member for Edmonton Riverbend, taking on this task and pushing a private member's bill forward to make sure this is an issue that we take seriously. It is a very small thing that we can do as parliamentarians to try to help the people out there who are suffering with this level of grief.

I can assure members that I have heard from all kinds of groups that have been trying to counsel and help parents dealing with the loss of a child or the caregiving leading up to that point in time. They would tell us unequivocally that this is a good piece of legislation and it deserves our support. It has my full support. I appreciate that the members who are here today and who are listening have shown their support as well, because this is important for families.

There are improvements we can make and there is more we can do, but this is a valuable first step. I do believe this would be appreciated by so many people, and I hope we are able to get this private member's bill through. It definitely deserves our attention.

My family would have appreciated something like this. In my case, I deal with grief by launching back into my work. That is how I deal with it, but that is not the same for everybody. Many families need the time. They need that time to heal, and at the very least they need that time to be able to get affairs in order and carry on with their lives.

Many employers are very giving when situations like this arise, and if they are good employers they certainly try to help their employees through these difficult times. However, this is an opportunity for those people who fit under the umbrella of this act, so they at least know that they would have a bit of support to be able to support their families.

I will close with this. This is difficult for families. It is incredibly difficult. They lead up into something, they lose someone and they need some time. All this bill is doing is asking for a bit of time. I hope everybody who is here listening today will recognize that and give this bill full support.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, the situation in Alberta is drastic. I always look at the root issue. My call on the government is to get some vaccines into my province so that we can deal with those hot spots, deal with those people who have become infected and so we can ensure that there are second doses, particularly for those who are compromised. I agree with her wholeheartedly that we have an issue in Alberta, but the problem lies directly on the Prime Minister of this country.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, the wording of the motion is that “the House call on the government to ensure that every Canadian adult has access to a vaccine by the May long weekend”. It says “access”. What we are encouraging the government to do is see if it can accelerate the delivery of vaccines into this country and get them to the provinces. I know for a fact the provinces are prepared to do the job. In my city of Edmonton, there are facilities available that are under-utilized because we do not have the vaccines. This encourages the government to get busy and get some vaccines in this country.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, certainly, what I am suggesting is the government should have a strategy to try and make sure we could get vaccines in this country. The strategy they had was CanSino. That was the initial strategy. How did that work out? If, by any measure, the member across would take a look at where the U.S. is now compared to where we are, he must realize there is an opportunity to get something done with them. A lot of the vaccines that are available are being developed in that country and are being made available to us.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I rise in the House today to speak about this third wave and the response to COVID-19. I really wish I did not have to rise today to speak about this because I have seen the plight this pandemic has hit people with.

People are at home, and people are frustrated. Businesses are closing, and people want to get back to work. They are absolutely frustrated with the lack of strategy. Dozens of countries have recently announced opening up their borders to the United States. It is a country that, early on in this, the Prime Minister criticized for its response to this pandemic.

I am speaking to this motion today, while last week Australia hosted its largest sporting event since the beginning of the pandemic last March. What is going on in Canada? In parts of the country we still cannot have even more than five people at an outdoor gathering. This is just not acceptable. Canada has fully vaccinated just under 3% of its population. It is a low figure.

It has also been explained that we have been spreading out the shots, going off label. Only 30%, a figure the government has been bragging about, has had one shot, so we are certainly behind when we try to measure against other countries. We should be doing better.

In the United States, we see cases and hospitalizations are dropping. We see businesses opening up and restaurants getting busy. Fans are returning to watch their favourite sports. Canadians are seeing this happen. They are also seeing the lack of response in our country and how we are falling behind.

The U.S. is able to do this because its population is getting vaccinated, so this is a sorry state of affairs. I often think about what the rest of the world is saying to itself. What on earth happened to Canada? We used to be known for, if nothing else, our kindness, our love of hockey and our great health care system. Those are things that we should be proud of and that we are known for.

Now we have positioned ourselves so people are looking at us to ask what happened to Canada, why we are so far behind and why we are continuing to add to lockdowns as the variants come. It is because of a lack of vaccines.

The exodus of small businesses breaks my heart. When we talk about who is essential to the economy, we think about the ma-and-pa operators whose businesses very much define who they are. It is essential to them. Since January this year, 220,000 have closed. Another ugly stat is that we hold the highest unemployment rate in the G7. This just should not be happening in Canada.

The worst part of all this is, rather than showing us there is a light at the end of the tunnel, which I guess is September, or showing us how we can get our lives back to normal like the rest of the world, the government is providing measures to help people, but unfortunately those measures are to keep them inside because we cannot get enough vaccines or enough testing in this country to get people back to work.

That is what it is all about, after all. I think it is a question of when there will be another global pandemic and whether the government, the next go-around, will call for lockdowns, saying that is what we have to do. Could we not be better prepared? Could governments not give Canadians better confidence that we are better prepared?

We should have learned from SARS and other pandemics and been better prepared. Certainly, we had some of that. We had PPE that was sitting in warehouses that was actually sent to a dump. We sent PPE to another country early on, and we had a shortfall. That is not planning. That is not being ready, and that is not having a strategy.

The reality of this situation is that investment in health care and manufacturing capacity cannot just be a one-time deal. We can look at AstraZeneca. It has been reported that we are paying significantly more than other countries, and we do not have the manufacturing capacity here in Canada to produce it. I would not really care about the dollar value of what we are paying if we were getting delivery, if we were ahead of the game, and if we could demonstrate we were getting better results because of paying more.

When we measure ourselves against other countries, that is not the case. The evidence is there. Look at Israel and what it was able to do without manufacturing capacity. Where is our government, and where was it early on in negotiations?

We have demonstrated as a country, particularly within North America, that when we work with our partners, we overcome extraordinary issues. I think of NORAD and how that was established with great co-operation between our two great countries. Where were we early on to not be with our American partners, determining how to protect North America and creating a strategy that worked for both of us? Where were we?

Even if we can get our manufacturing squared up in Canada, we cannot just rely on ourselves. We have to be part of a strategic initiative with other countries and industry. After a slow start, Pfizer, its partner BioNTech and Moderna raised the game and raised their output, gaining experience, scaling up production and taking steps to produce certain raw material on their own. The U.S.A. got in front of this and leveraged businesses and the public sector to step in.

We have enormous talent in this country. We should have reached out. We should have, as the U.S. and U.K. did, looked for solutions early on. We have the talent in this country to do it, and it was sadly missed by the government, either by ignoring it or being slow to recognize it.

The U.S. government gave vaccine makers access to supplies under the Defense Production Act, which provided $105 million in funding to help Merck make doses of the J&J COVID-19 vaccine and expedite materials to be used in its production. They got in front of it.

There will be no economic recovery in its entirety without a health recovery. We need a line of sight. We need some measurables, and we need to understand where we are going and what the plan is. That is what this motion is about.

One can criticize whether we can get there by May, but one of the frustrations of Canadians is there is no plan. We need to see the government move forward and set targets, measure them against other jurisdictions and demonstrate to Canadians it is on top of this.

We needed leadership on rapid procurement. We did not see leadership on it. Saying that POs have been written, that we have the biggest procurement strategy and the most POs out there, has not resulted in vaccines in the arms of Canadians. We should we ashamed that we have not been able to execute that better.

There is a lack of leadership on manufacturing. I recognize the government is now showing interest in this and is starting to put some time, money and effort into this area, which has been needed. I send my congratulations on that, albeit late.

I mentioned collaboration with the U.S. There is no reason we should not be able to work with our partners because we are such an integrated economy. We need to bring experts together to make sure we could get this right. If we did not know it before, this is something we should know now. I encourage the government to bring those experts together and make sure we are reacting to this better and properly preparing for the future.

It has been a year. We are still behind in testing. While the rest of the world has sped ahead, there is virtually no talk about the border reopening at this point. It does not even hit the headlines when the border closure between the U.S. and Canada is extended.

Overall, there has been a gross lack of leadership. At the end of the day, people are frustrated. They want to get back to work. They do not want to operate in bubbles anymore. Enough is enough. Let us show some leadership. The people I represent in the great riding of Edmonton Centre demand more of us. Let us get a plan and get people back to work.

[Proceedings on a Bill Entitled An Act to Provide for the Resumption and Continuation of Operations at the Port of Montreal, April 27th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, we hear from the government that every step of the way it hopes something is going to happen. Often we hear these words, with no action. Is this not all about leadership and getting something done, leadership from the Prime Minister?

[Employment, April 27th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, that was all over the map. I will give a little advice. There are numerous energy projects across this country awaiting approval. These are real projects and real jobs. Thousands of them, in fact, are shovel-ready and employ those who already have the skills.

While we are waiting for the government's great master plan to re-skill Canadians, can we at least get these Canadians back to work now?

[Employment, April 27th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, last week government members made more big promises about how they are going to retrain workers and get them back to work in droves, yet they have not told us what these jobs will be, who the employers will be or how long that retraining will take.

Can the minister please tell us what specific jobs Canadians are being re-skilled for?

[Garrett Cumming, April 26th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise today to speak of an extraordinary individual and constituent who left us on March 5. He lived life to the fullest and accomplished more than most would in 35 years. He lived his life with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which provided challenges but never defined him. He managed to complete two degrees, travel the world and was an enormous inspiration to many.

This remarkable young man's name is Garrett Cumming, and he is our son. He wrote a piece years ago that is framed on my desk about me as his role model, but he did not realize that he had it backward.

Today, I would also like to recognize a physician, a Dr. House of sorts. Dr. Lyle McGonigle started as a vet, realized after having kids that he could provide better care and returned to school to become a pediatrician. Dr. M. told Garrett, “I will see you for as long as you want”, and that is what he did. He and his team offered Garrett straight, no-nonsense talk, always combined with compassion and care.

Garrett had a team of caregivers over the years who not only provided for his personal care, but assisted with his courses, travel and, most important, caring and companionship.

I thank the front-line workers.

Garrett is missed.

[Health, April 22nd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, throughout the pandemic, immune-compromised individuals have had to live in fear and isolation. My son, Garrett, is one of these individuals. Immune-compromised persons need vaccines, which the Prime Minister has not delivered.

Only 2% of Canadians are fully vaccinated. Experts are sounding alarms about the four-month, off-label dosing interval, potentially compromising health outcomes. Canadians should not live in fear, and the failure to get vaccines lies directly with the Prime Minister.

Will the minister apologize for this failure?