Madam Speaker, I would like to start by recognizing the personal and economic sacrifices Canadians have made during this pandemic. They did everything that was within their control to do. They stayed home, they followed public health orders and they suffered hardships. Families across this country are grieving the 23,756 people who have died.
Since the first weeks of the pandemic, I have advocated for the approach that Taiwan took. At the beginning, Taiwan was one of the top 10 countries affected. Now, it is ranked 191. Taiwan applied what it learned from the SARS outbreak. It had a mask mandate and it gave every resident three masks per week. It installed hand sanitizer at the entrance to every building. The army worked with manufacturers to expedite the production of personal protective equipment and it had huge fines for PPE hoarding and profiteering. It had testing and temperature checks for inter-regional travel. It had tight controls on its border and travellers returning home faced mandatory quarantining. Those actions protected its economy. It never had a lockdown like the ones that we have had here.
Earlier in the pandemic, the Green Party caucus advocated for the government to invoke the Emergencies Act using the provisions of a public welfare emergency. It is a very well-written piece of legislation that replaced the old War Measures Act. Invoking it would have allowed the government to create a federally coordinated response with the provinces; close the border; mandate quarantines for people returning to Canada; control interprovincial and inter-regional travel; create green zones for opening the economy and red zones to control areas where there was community spread with lockdowns; all things that were done in New Zealand and Australia and other countries that successfully fought the pandemic.
Our calls to invoke the Emergencies Act were ignored. Whether the Emergencies Act was the right tool for the job or not, it is clear that stronger national coordination has been sorely missing in Canada's approach to dealing with the pandemic. We need a federal-provincial task force to create better coordination.
Just last month, during an adjournment debate, I pointed out that the one thing that all countries that went to zero had in common was a coordinated national strategy. I argued that it was not too late for a national strategy. In fact, we need it more than ever. In response, I was scolded by the parliamentary secretary and told that I did not understand the Constitution and that the government did not want to cause a constitutional crisis. I was floored by the weakness of that argument.
Almost 24,000 people have died. The economy is struggling. We have the largest deficit in Canadian history and 180,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across this country are on the verge of closing permanently. Millions of Canadians are financially stressed. We have a mental health crisis. The suicide rate is up and we have a shadow pandemic of intimate partner violence. Drug overdoses have increased. We are in the third wave of the pandemic with variants spreading rapidly and more cases than ever before. We have another series of lockdowns in Canada in its biggest provinces and Canadians are angry, scared and fed up. Our governments have done a poor job of coordinating the fight to end this pandemic, but at least we managed to avoid a constitutional crisis.
Canadians are looking at what is happening in other countries and it is not lost on them that our strategy in Canada is not working. Inadequate coordination between the federal, provincial and territorial responses has failed to stop the spread of the virus. We are using a yo-yo method of lockdown, opening up and lockdown again to try to limit the pandemic, rather than employing a get-to-zero strategy. In countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan and South Korea, the spread of COVID-19 has been arrested: case levels are down, the death toll is lower, the economies are up and running and people are going about their lives.
What can Canada learn? Where did we go wrong and how can we move forward in a way that will result in less hardship for Canadians?
Countries that have eliminated the spread of the disease share these key aspects. They had a national strategy. They closed borders. They required quarantines for citizens returning from international locations. They limited internal travel within the country. They created red zones to lock down and green zones where the economy could stay open. They mandated masks for indoor public spaces. They tested widely and used contact tracing. They continued to use circuit breaker lockdowns to quickly stop new outbreaks in specific areas. The key to success was to isolate outbreaks and use multiple tools to limit the spread of the virus. These are actions that the Green Party MPs advocated for in the early days of the pandemic.
Instead of a well-coordinated national strategy, Canadians had a patchwork of provincial health orders that were often contradictory and confusing. In some cases, COVID-19-related decisions appear to be driven by politics instead of science.
In B.C., during the lockdowns, when the rest of us had to remain at home, workers continued to travel in and out of camps to construct the Coastal GasLink and Trans Mountain expansion pipelines and the Site C dam. This led to the spread of COVID in remote northern communities. When Newfoundland thought it had the spread of COVID under control, workers from the camps in the oil sands brought COVID home with them and contributed to the spread there. The border to the U.S. has been technically closed for a year, but there is a real lack of control over travel.
Since April 6, more than 100 international flights landing in Canada have carried at least one positive COVID-19 case on board. The deputy chief public health officer stated, “We know that, with viruses, it’s practically impossible to prevent new variants from arriving here in Canada.” However, other countries have been successful in stopping the spread of new variants by travellers. It may not make sense to target specific countries anymore, but we can control air travel the same way New Zealand and Australia have.
I appreciate the fact that the government organized an intergovernmental coordinating committee with medical health officers from across the country, but we needed more than a committee. We needed more than a patchwork of confusing protocols and mandates that change from province to province.
Canada is a federation, and it is true that the provinces have jurisdiction over health care. I understand that the federal government is reluctant to use the emergency powers to create and enforce a national strategy. Some provincial governments have at times politicized this pandemic. Such actions have been detrimental for Canadians. The Emergencies Act may not be the right tool, but we have to stop letting the dysfunction in our federalist system get in the way of a more coordinated response.
Australia is also a federation, with jurisdictional and political differences between the national and state governments, but they worked together successfully to stop the spread of COVID-19, and the population there is much better off for that co-operation.
The vaccines are finally starting to roll out across the country, but with the spread of new variants, it is not yet certain how effective the vaccines will prove to be. We need to be prepared to stop the spread of variants that may be vaccine-resistant. We are not out of the woods yet, and a lack of national co-ordination can still have dire consequences.
There has been a lack of political courage to do what is necessary at the federal level in Canada. On both sides of the House, there is little appetite to do anything that might upset a provincial premier. The lack of a unified national COVID-19 strategy continues to have poor outcomes and hurts Canadians in a myriad of ways. We need stronger national co-ordination, and the sooner we start, the better results we will achieve.
Pandemics do not respect jurisdiction. Let us stand together as a nation, get to zero and beat COVID-19.
