Madam Speaker, it is an honour for me to be able to speak about Alberta, the province I grew up in, live in, represent and love so much.
This is an important debate. I will say it has also at times been an odd debate, odd I think because the federal New Democrats, especially my hon. friend from Edmonton Strathcona, are using the federal House of Commons to offer a highly partisan critique of the UCP government in Alberta. I am not here to praise or critique the UCP government. I think I have enough to do seeking to hold the federal government accountable in the federal House of Commons, to push it to adopt policies that are in the national interest and protect Canadians by getting us out of this pandemic.
The NDP members have declared that Canadians do not care about jurisdiction, they want politicians to act. To this, I would observe that jurisdictional details are actually extremely important to how we resolve this crisis. The federal government cannot impose gathering restrictions and provincial governments cannot control borders. Everyone needs to do their job in their own area of jurisdiction. It is silly to pretend that jurisdictional responsibility does not matter. Jurisdictional responsibility is crucial. Politicians need to understand where their responsibilities lie. Then they need to act in those areas of responsibility to do their part to get the outcomes that we are all looking for.
What we have seen during too much of this crisis is an obscuring of responsibility. It is not just the NDP; many federal Liberals have also taken every opportunity to slam the actions of various provincial governments. That might be understandable if the federal government had carried off its own responsibilities flawlessly, but that is far from the case, so now instead of acting effectively it is often shifting responsibility.
I want to pose what I think is the fundamental question for this conversation, the question Canadians have been asking for a long time. Let us end the finger-pointing between different levels of government and let us establish who is responsible for solving the problem of COVID-19 in Canada. Who is responsible for getting us out of this crisis, for charting a course to something different, for building a plan to get us beyond the current pandemic? Who is responsible?
Too often we hear from the provinces that the feds should do certain things, we hear from the feds about what the provinces should do, meanwhile both are saying they are deferring to experts. The public health experts in different jurisdictions do not always agree with each other and do not actually have the ability to publicly contradict the politicians they report to.
Further, when it comes to expertise, it is, by its nature, specialized. One expert may be well placed to tell us about the spread of a disease, but less able to explain the social factors that contribute to whether or not people follow guidelines in certain situations. A different expert still may be required to explain the impacts on life and well-being that are associated with large-scale unemployment caused by certain kinds of policies. The point is that generally we expect politicians to gather the feedback of different experts and make a decision that synthesizes that feedback and applies collective values as dictated by the electorate. That is the point of having a democracy instead of an aristocracy of expertise.
Today, the politicians say they are deferring to the experts when in reality the experts still report in private to politicians and politicians are the ones actually taking decisions, so again there is a lack of clarity about who is actually responsible. When I say “who” is responsible, I am not intending to refer to the World Health Organization, although it is evident that many people in this government would like to defer responsibility for their decisions to the WHO, even though it has been clear from the beginning there have been serious flaws in its approach and recommendations. The WHO is ultimately constrained by its member states. As we have seen, that has limited its action in particular, for instance, in response to identifying issues coming out of China at the beginning. There has been a lot of just passing back and forth the—