Madam Speaker, I would like to start by recognizing the personal and economic sacrifices that Canadians have made during the pandemic. They have stayed home, they have followed public health orders and they have done everything in their power to flatten the curve and beat COVID-19.
Families across the country are grieving the 21,000 people who have died. Now, a year into the pandemic, Canadians are exhausted and frustrated. The repeated lockdowns and restrictions have taken a heavy toll. Small and medium-sized businesses are struggling to survive. Millions of people are experiencing financial hardship. Mental health challenges, drug overdoses and domestic violence have all increased.
Despite the sacrifices, COVID-19 is still spreading in our communities, and new variants are a growing concern. Canadians are looking at what is happening in other countries, and it is not lost on them that the strategy in Canada is not working. Inadequate coordination between federal, provincial and territorial responses has failed to stop the spread of the virus.
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 much lower, economies are up and running, and people are going about their lives. What can Canada learn? Where did we go wrong? 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 mandated masks for indoor public spaces; they tested and used contact tracing; they continue to use circuit-breaker lockdowns to quickly stop new outbreaks; and the health minister is in charge of vaccine procurement, not the industry minister.
The key to success was to isolate outbreaks and use multiple tools to limit the spread of the virus. These are actions that Green Party MPs advocated for in the early days of the pandemic. Instead of a well-coordinated national strategy, Canadians have had a patchwork of provincial health orders that were often contradictory and confusing. In some cases, COVID-19-related decisions appeared to be driven by politics instead of science.
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 changed from province to province.
Canada is a federation, and it is true that provinces have jurisdiction over health care. I understand that the federal government is reluctant to use its emergency powers to create and enforce a national strategy. Some provincial governments have at times politicized this pandemic, and such actions have been detrimental to Canadians.
Australia is also a federation with jurisdictional and political differences between the national and state governments, but they worked together successfully in a coordinated effort to stop the spread of COVID-19. The population there is much better off for that co-operation.
The vaccines are finally rolling out across the country, but with the spread of new variants, it is not 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 coordination can still have dire consequences.
