Toronto, April 22: The opposition MPs from Green, NDP and Conservative Party have criticized the current Liberal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday and called for more national leadership as variants transmission surge across many provinces in Canada.
In an emergency debate in the House of Commons, the former Green Party leader MP Elizabeth May said that, “Collectively, as a country, we are not doing what Canadians want and what Canadians deserve. This is a place full of people who have been elected to serve the public of this country and we have to be of service, and at this time that means blowing the whistle and saying what we are doing now is not working.”
Meanwhile, Canada has identified 70,300 variant cases to date out of a total of 1,139,000 since the pandemic began. The B117 variant of concern first identified in the United Kingdom accounts for almost 96 per cent of the variant cases, which become the dominant strain in Canada’s four largest provinces, such as, British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. As a result, this quick transmission of much contagious and deadly variants of corona virus across Canada is driving a reappearance of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in these provinces as well as others affected.
Along Elizabeth May, her party’s MP Paul Manly compared Canada’s response to those of Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan, where all kept their case counts and deaths downward. He categorically emphasized that, experiences of these countries show strong national leadership, closing borders, enforcing strict quarantines, travelling within the country, widespread testing and tracing as well as using lockdown measures when necessary.
Also, NDP MP Don Davies has criticized the federal government for leaving matters too much to the provincial leaderships. He said the Ontario government is so “overwhelmed” by a surge in cases that the federal government should step in and invoke the Emergencies Act, which gives the prime minister sweeping powers to respond to an urgent or critical situation, overriding the provinces and territories in areas that normally fall under their jurisdiction.
Moreover, Conservative MP John Barlow repeated his party’s stance against Liberal government’s vaccine rollout, saying that, “As a result of that inability to meet the most basic needs of a federal government to ensure the safety of its constituents, Canadians are dying as a result not only of COVID-19 but of mental health crisis.”
However, in response to those criticisms, Health Minister Patty Hajdu said, “Like many countries around the world, we have struggled to maintain public health measures in place due to concerning economic and social harms.” She further elaborated that the national vaccination campaign has started to show results, where already 10,719,000 vaccine doses have been administered nationwide as of yesterday.
