moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
Madam Speaker, I want to thank the Speaker for allowing us to have this debate today. It is an extremely important debate, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to stand and represent my constituents and represent all people in Alberta and across Canada who are deeply concerned about what is happening in my province.
We are here tonight because Alberta, my province, is in crisis and that crisis is threatening all of Canada. Once again, Alberta reported nearly 2,000 new cases of COVID-19 today. Alberta's per capita rate of infection is the highest in Canada, nearly double that of Ontario. It is the highest rate of infection in North America and one of the highest rates in the world. In some locations in Alberta, the rate of infection is higher than in India.
ICUs in Alberta are nearing capacity. There is no more room for acute COVID patients. There is no more capacity in the health care system to deal with this crisis. Alberta's acute care health care system is on the verge of collapse.
Late last week, Alberta Health Services instructed physicians to review a new protocol, the critical care triage framework. The framework is designed to guide physicians in case of “a dire situation” where “the demand for life-sustaining critical care support is greater than the available resources”. In other words, for the first time in history, Alberta's doctors have been given emergency instructions on how to determine which patients will receive life-saving treatment and which ones will not, instructions to determine who lives and who dies.
As I am sure everyone in Canada can appreciate, Alberta's physicians are not pleased that it has come to this. Edmonton doctor Noel Gibney, who co-chairs the Edmonton pandemic response committee, said that the implementation of the triage framework would be devastating for physicians, for nurses and for other front-line health care workers. He said:
It would put significant moral distress on ICU doctors and nurses because we would see patients who would typically, although very sick, with appropriate critical care treatment would normally survive but instead those individuals would be referred to palliative care.
On Monday, 50 critical care physicians, including Dr. Gibney, wrote an open letter to Premier Jason Kenney warning that there were not enough critical care health workers in Alberta to handle more cases, begging the premier to do something to stop the exponential growth in cases, and yet, last night, in a highly anticipated prime-time announcement, he refused to take questions from reporters. Jason Kenney failed once again to lead Alberta through this crisis.
If members want to know why it is so bad in Alberta, why other provinces have withstood the third wave better than my province, the answer is clear: It is Jason Kenney. From the very beginning of this global pandemic, he has failed Albertans. His Donald Trump-like approach to COVID-19 has put us where we are today: in a state of absolute crisis.
At the beginning of the global pandemic last year and through wave after wave of infection, Jason Kenney has bowed to the worst elements of his political base, downplaying the lethal threat that COVID-19 poses and instead belittling efforts to stop the transmission of the virus. He has referred to the coronavirus repeatedly as nothing more than a flu, even after medical experts alerted us that calling COVID a flu was misleading and damaging to public health efforts and even after we had seen the devastating impact COVID-19 has had on our seniors, especially those living in long-term care.
Just like Donald Trump, Premier Kenney promised that the flu would go away. Rather than shut down schools to prevent transmission, Jason Kenney claimed that there was no transmission in schools. When his own government data suggested otherwise, when we saw outbreaks in school after school, he shut down contact tracing of cases in schools because, of course, they cannot report on what they refuse to measure.
My children are in those schools. I send my children to school every day and it is terrifying. It is terrifying for my children, but it is also terrifying for those teachers who had to be on the front line, who were not prioritized for vaccinations. It is terrifying to know that every day they may be bringing COVID home. They may be bringing COVID to their neighbours, their families. It is devastating. My son's best friend has come down with COVID.
In August I brought forward the unanimous consent motion asking the Government of Canada to put $2 billion toward a safer restart, a safer reopening for schools and $262 million of that went to Alberta schools. We were depending on the federal government to step in. We could not count on our provincial government to do what it needed to do to protect teachers, to protect students, to protect our loved ones.
Rather than address infections in homeless populations, Jason Kenney claims that the homeless somehow have immunity to COVID-19, stating that they have “a very high level of immune resistance against an influenza of this nature”. Again, it is “an influenza”.
Our seniors were dying and the seriousness of COVID-19 was downplayed by comparing the average age of those dying at the time, which was 83, with the average life expectancy of age 82. It was so callous and cruel. Everybody else has been to blame for the failures that have happened in Alberta. There are stories of birthday parties and that was why there was transmission. There is the blaming of the South Asian community for high rates of transmission in Calgary.
Last week, I stood in the House because Jason Kenney blamed high rates of infection in Wood Buffalo on indigenous people, when he knows, when I know, when we all know, that the high rates in the area are from work camps serving the oil sands. Wood Buffalo is just one hotspot in Alberta, but it is an important one, because rising infections there could lead to the rapid spread throughout the rest of Canada.
In Alberta, oil and gas workers were deemed essential by Jason Kenney's United Conservative government. That means that dozens of oil sands workers have been flying in and out of the area from all over Canada since the beginning of the pandemic.
Perhaps the biggest failure has been the dance around COVID restrictions. I believe, honestly, this is the biggest lesson all of us need to take from this pandemic. The failure to acknowledge the reality of COVID-19 and to commit to ending its spread is devastating to our health, our lives, our economy. We have seen time and time again that half measures do not work.
Throughout this pandemic I have to say Jason Kenney has been the king of half measures. One day he is placing restrictions; the next day he is playing them down. He wants to rely on personal responsibility rather than government action, but that has left Albertans in a devastating position.
Last week in the face of overwhelming evidence from around the world that restrictions are highly effective at stopping the spread of infections and one of the only ways to fight COVID-19 other than vaccines, we were told it is “a false idea” that lockdowns stop the viral spread.
Now, thanks to Jason Kenney's lack of leadership, thanks to the provincial government telling police authorities not to enforce the few restrictions in place, thanks to the bumbling, stumbling joke that our provincial government has become, we have the single greatest public health crisis Alberta has ever seen. Despite all this, despite the highest rate of infection in North America, despite the crisis in our ICUs, I am still the only member of Parliament from Alberta to call out Jason Kenney and this nonsense.
With a positivity rate of 13% this week, infection hotspots like Wood Buffalo mean that Alberta's COVID crisis will soon become Canada's COVID crisis if nothing is done. We are in a race between vaccines and variants. This is true everywhere in Canada and it is true all around the world, but we are losing the race in Alberta. On Monday, Alberta Health Services stopped testing for variants of concern. The reason is that the variants have taken over.
Virtually every case of COVID in Alberta is a variant of concern now. If left unchecked, the COVID petri dish that is Alberta promises to create more variants. It is a matter of time.
The goal now must be to stop the exponential growth of infections in Alberta; to save lives; to not put doctors, nurses and other health care workers through the trauma of saying “no” to patients who desperately need help; and critically, for the sake of all of us to prevent a new variant that threatens every Canadian from emerging.
Alberta must not be left to deal with this crisis on its own. There is simply too much at stake, and I have to say that Jason Kenney is not alone in his failure of Albertans. The government bears part of the responsibility for this crisis as well. Throughout the pandemic, Jason Kenney has maintained that his policies are designed to protect livelihoods as well as lives, so there has been this focus on our economy, but we know now that countries and provinces that have focused on stopping COVID-19 are the ones that have succeeded in protecting their economies, and that they are integrally tied together. Alberta has failed in both.
We have the worst infection rates and we have had the greatest negative impact on our economy. Over and over again, the Prime Minister has stated that he has our backs and that every Canadian, and I would remind the Prime Minister that “every Canadian” means every Albertan will get the support they need to get through COVID-19. If this was actually true, if we actually were going to give the support that was necessary to Canadians, then premiers like Jason Kenney and Doug Ford could have imposed the strict regulations we needed to stop the spread of COVID and not have had to worry about the economy.
The truth of the matter is that Jason Kenney is not the only one guilty of half-measures. When the government promised us sick leave, they gave us a “sort of” sick leave program. When the government promised income support for workers, they gave us a program that did not work for at least a third of those workers who were impacted. When the government promised programs to help businesses, those programs left out countless small businesses, self-proprietors and the self-employed. When the government promised jobs for students, it designed a program that would not work with an organization that could not deliver, and those jobs were never created.
I stood in the House and got unanimous consent that we would protect recent graduates, and the government never followed through on that. When the government promised in the throne speech that it would extend the moratorium on student loan repayments, when it promised support for people living with disabilities, when it asserted that workers threatened by COVID-19 transmission in their place of work could rely on it for support and it would protect workers' rights to refuse unsafe work, every time the government has failed.
We have not even been able to get the government to move on one of the most basic things we should be looking at right now during a global health pandemic. We have not been able to get the government to move beyond the study of pharmacare. It voted against a pharmacare program in the middle of a global health pandemic. We should be expanding our health care system. We should be making sure we have a pharmacare system now, more than ever, and the government has failed us there.
Jason Kenney has been an unmitigated disaster for Alberta, but his terrible job is happening on the Prime Minister's terrible foundation. The federal government needed to do a better job preparing us for this pandemic, ensuring we had paid sick days, implementing a pharmacare program and making sure indigenous communities were better supported. The Prime Minister saw this coming. He has watched this happening in Alberta, and he has done nothing, because he would rather watch Alberta burn than help Jason Kenney. Both the premier and the Prime Minister are playing political games, and Albertans are dying. People in Alberta are dying because of inaction and because of the finger pointing between the federal and provincial governments.
While these governments are trying to decide who is to blame, families are losing loved ones. Not one family I have spoken to is worried about jurisdiction. Not one family is saying that they do not want help from either government to save their loved ones. No one is saying that the feds should not act because it is up to the province. They want us, their elected representatives, to throw everything we have so that their loved ones can come home at the end of the day. It is our job to do everything we can to help people survive this.
The federal government needs to listen to the NDP, and it needs to do more. We need to help get more vaccines to Alberta, especially to the hot spots that we have identified. We need to get vaccines into the hot zones right now. That needs to happen, and it needs to be a priority. We need to get fixes to paid sick leave so that workers can actually use the program. We need to fix our long-term care systems. We need to make sure that seniors are protected. We need to make sure that we are protecting everybody so that when this is over, and we know that we are facing future pandemics, we will have learned our lessons and be better prepared for the next time around.
It seems to me that Jason Kenney and the Prime Minister are putting all their hopes into vaccines and the coming warmer weather, and I understand that. Vaccines are the ultimate answer to come out of COVID-19 and be able to get our families back. However, there is a problem with that. We do not have a guarantee that this will work when, right now in Alberta, there are 1,500, 1,700, 2,000, 4,000, who knows, who are becoming infected right now, today. We simply do not have time to wait. Every second counts in this race, and this is the most important wave that we will deal with.
We know that we need to act, and we need to act fast. Alberta needs the federal government to step up to the plate. Alberta and all of Canada needs this government to live up to its obligations and support us through the third wave.
Albertans are incredible people. Most Albertans are following COVID-19 protocols. Most Albertans want to solve this crisis, but we need help. We need this government to work directly with indigenous communities in Alberta municipalities to deliver the support they need to get through the third wave. We need money for social services. We need federal support for rapid vaccination programs in the hardest-hit areas. We need this government to live up to the promises that it has made to Albertans.