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Mr. Speaker, this last weekend marked 20 years since the first North American safe injection site, Insite, opened in Vancouver. Since 2003, it has proven to be a lifesaver, with 1.7 million visits.

I want to give a shout-out to those who looked at the positive evidence of harm reduction seen in Europe and took a chance on a pilot project with the Portland health society that proved successful.

The catalyst was Mayor Philip Owen, who convinced two other levels of government to sign the Vancouver agreement. The MP for Vancouver East was the provincial minister, I was the federal representative, and all three of us, together with UBC's Drs. Montaner, Kerr and O'Shaughnessy, who headed the pilot project, took a political risk based on evidence. Eighteen months later we saw 100% of lives saved and knew it was all worth it. It still is.

Mr. Speaker, I inadvertently voted nay. I would like to vote yea on the last vote.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 34(1), I have the honour to present to the House, in both official languages, the report of the Canadian Delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's parliamentary assembly, respecting its participation at the 20th autumn meeting in Warsaw, Poland, from November 24 to 26, 2022.

Madam Chair, excuse my voice. I have asthma, and I am suffering from the pollution syndrome right now.

I just want to say that there was some misinformation that went on in this House, and I want to correct it.

Madam Speaker, it is always interesting to watch when someone is trying to be personal and nasty. People can make assumptions. My headset was plugged in. It just did not work for that moment.

I just wanted to say that there was a great deal of misinformation and, may I say, disinformation that went on with the hon. member's speech. If the hon. member will recall, the hon. member mentioned the clause-by-clause discussion of one of the very contentious bills on his committee. The committee did not work, and we had problems; we had to come back to the House to ask the House to set time limits for how we dealt with clause-by-clause. The reason for this was that his party filibustered every second clause. There was filibustering going on, and that was what created a dysfunctional committee, not my being hybrid, not my being there. I had everything in front of me. It was working extremely well.

Let us not be nasty and mean to people who have problems and sometimes could be ill.

Mr. Speaker, Liberal governments have done more to advance equality for the 2SLGBTQI+ community in Canada, and globally, yet we continue to see an alarming rise in hate directed at this community, both here and abroad.

From 2020 to 2021 alone, there was a 64% increase in hate-motivated violence against this community in Canada. Queer and transgender Canadians are subjected to harassment, threats, vandalism, swatting and assault.

In 1993, I ran on the issue of equality under the law for 2SLGBTQI+ persons and continue to champion this cause as our government funds community organizations, banned conversion therapy and redressed past wrongs to the Canadian Armed Forces.

What I have learned is that no one can take equality for granted. Basic human rights can be removed easily by non-progressive governments. Be on guard as parliamentarians and act for queer safety.

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the sixth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, entitled “Main Estimates 2023-24”.

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fifth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, entitled “Strengthening the Status of the Artist in Canada”.

Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to the report.

Madam Speaker, Wednesday was International Women's Day, but it is not too late to reflect. In fact, we should never forget them: the millions of women who live in conflict areas, displaced by war and without home or family. These women are often the victims of rape, trafficked or forced into sexual slavery or servitude, and girls are forced into early marriage just to survive. Many have no access to health services, and their protectors are often their aggressors.

Let us think of them, advocate for them and ensure they are always in our thoughts and at the front of the line for humanitarian aid.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank those members in the House who spoke so passionately and eloquently in support of this bill. The bill was brought forward, as was said, by Senator Mégie, who is a fellow physician from the Senate. I then brought it to the House.

The need to remember is very important. With Bill S-209, we want to remember, and we want to learn. Remembering means that we learn from our mistakes. There are so many things we did wrong. We need to learn from them for the next time there is a pandemic, and there are going to be more pandemics because we are now a global world in which everyone travels. Everyone moves from place to place, and therefore disease can spread globally very rapidly. Therefore, we need to learn from our mistakes.

We also need to learn from the things we did well; we should maybe do them sooner or deal with them differently. A pandemic is all about science. Science is all about evidence. There is evidence in this pandemic that we need to learn from. That is one of the reasons for remembering.

The second reason for remembering is that we need to honour the frontline workers, the heroes in this pandemic. They went out there, gave their lives and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. We now have a problem in our medicare system because all our frontline workers are burned out. They do not want to work anymore because they are so burned out by the trauma of going through this.

We also want to remember the victims, specifically all those people who died. We heard everyone speaking eloquently about the seniors, as well as about the youth, whose education was interrupted and who were alone and did not have anyone to turn to. We heard about all of the people who were not able to meet and the families disrupted. We need to remember that. We need to remember the 50,000 Canadians who died from this particular pandemic. We need to remember those things.

A day of remembrance is not unknown. We have Remembrance Day every November 11 because we want to remember World War II. This was the war we thought was going to end all wars, but it did not. As we are now living through the war in Ukraine, we remember what we should have remembered and should have learned to prevent some of these things from happening and to make sure they do not continue to happen.

Pandemics are like wars. They indiscriminately affect, kill and wreak destruction in the path of people. They do not pick and choose. Now that we are a world that is together, as my hon. NDP colleague said, we need to remember that we are now a global community. We are no longer isolated in our own little nation states.

The next time there is a virus, bacteria or something that is going to destroy us, we know it is again going to be a global pandemic. The World Health Organization remembers and recalls this pandemic. It is warning us about future pandemics to come. If we can learn, remember and honour, then this is what this pandemic remembrance day is all about.

I want to thank those who supported my bill from Senator Mégie.

Mr. Speaker, lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services is the greatest cause of women's disability, disease and death globally. It was declared a human right in 1995, at the UN conference on women in Beijing, but it is still an elusive sustainable development goal.

Recent WHO data shows that 200 million women lack access to contraception, 300,000 still die each year in childbirth, and 25 million have to use unsafe abortion. In addition, 250 million people still get STDs. Girls continue to face forced early marriage and female genital mutilation. Moreover, although rape is a tactic of war, most women in conflict zones have no access to safe abortions.

Canada is a global leader in SHRH international aid, but every parliamentarian here should advocate for universal access to SHRH to support the world's girls and women.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank all members who spoke in favour of this bill.

As a physician for 22 years, I saw negligence in seniors home. I saw an inability to provide the appropriate protocols of cleanliness and the right kind of care. I saw actual abuse as well. What COVID-19 did was expose this for people other than physicians like me and for Canadians, who now see the vulnerability within the system.

We have, in the Criminal Code, the ability to protect children who are vulnerable. This bill would expand that to protect not only seniors but persons with disabilities and vulnerable adults.

I want to point out that an important thing about this bill is that we are not talking about adults who are being taken care of by their blood relatives or by people who are related to them by marriage. We are speaking of people who are taking care of three or more vulnerable adults who are not related to them by blood or marriage. We are talking about facilities, whether they are large institutions or small institutions. I think it is not just about abuse; it is about negligence and failure in the duty to protect vulnerable adults.

This is, for me, a first step. I think many people have said this is the first step, and I want to thank everyone who recognizes it as that. It is not intruding on provincial or territorial jurisdiction. This is about making those who provide care within institutions, whether they are owners or managers, actually provide that care and are accountable.

I have had patients with problems who did not have anywhere to go. Nobody was held accountable, and there were no standards to live up to. There was nothing going on. I think if we look at what happened during COVID in 2020, the scathing report from the 4th Canadian Division's joint task force really exposed all of the deficiencies within the system.

I want to thank everyone for supporting the bill. I agree with everyone that the standards set out by the CSA and the HSO are important standards. However, because they are voluntary, there is no teeth to them. Criminalizing the behaviour of owners and managers who specifically fail to do their duty toward vulnerable adults will give them some teeth. It lets people know that there is a place they can go, that people can be held accountable and that they have to live up to certain requirements.

Again, I want to thank everyone for supporting the bill. I have had calls from many members who have told me they can see ways to make it a better private member's bill at committee by adding amendments that would strengthen it, and I welcome them. I look forward to seeing this bill at committee and having people bring forward amendments that would strengthen it.

At the end of the day, this is about protecting our vulnerable adults, whether they are disabled, they are seniors or they have a chronic illness. I thank everyone for their support.

Mr. Speaker, February is Heart Month, and yesterday was Valentine's Day. What better time to discuss a matter near and dear to my heart, women's cardiac health?

Forty per cent of Canadians are unaware that heart disease and stroke are the leading cause of premature death in women. In fact, only 11% of women can tell if they have had a heart attack. Most cardiac research is about men: chest pain going into the neck and into the left arm. Heart attacks in women present differently, such as discomfort in the jaw, shoulder or belly, nausea or vomiting, often mimicking heartburn.

If a woman has these signs, someone should call 911 immediately. Learning CPR can double her chance of survival. Please visit heartandstroke.ca. The life one saves may be a woman one loves.

Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in relation to Bill C‑18, an act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada.

The committee has studied the bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House with amendments.

moved that Bill C-295, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (neglect of vulnerable adults), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

She said: Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to stand for the second reading of my private member's bill, Bill C-295, which would amend sections 214 and 215 of the Criminal Code to include penalties for the neglect of vulnerable adults.

What this amendment would do is add some definitions. One is “long-term care facility”, which means somewhere with three or more adults unrelated to the owner or manager by blood or marriage. We are also defining what a manager is. A manager is somebody who administers, hires staff, purchases supplies like medical supplies, directs the daily performance of facility staff, coordinates and plans care for the residents and how the staff provides that care, applies protocols and procedures to give good care, and controls and evaluates those procedures and the quality of care in order to do something very important, which is to provide the necessities of life to residents.

Section 215 of the act defines the duty to provide necessities of life and the bill defines the failure to perform this as meaning to endanger life or to cause health to be injured permanently. Those are the two things we mean by the words “failure to perform”.

This bill would also prohibit an offender who has been found culpable from seeking or obtaining work in any facility that takes care of vulnerable adults, or even volunteering in a facility that takes care of vulnerable adults. By “vulnerable adults” we mean anyone who is vulnerable as a result of age, mental disorder, illness or disability or who is frail. The penalty for failure to do this means a person would be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or would be punished on summary conviction.

Why are we bringing this up right now? It is because COVID-19 showed us that vulnerable adults are very much at risk. Let us look at the deaths in Canada as a result of COVID-19. Sixty-nine per cent were vulnerable adults, compared with the international average of 41% anywhere else in the world. We know that long-term care facilities are under provincial jurisdiction, so what we saw across this country during COVID-19 was a large variability in the results and deaths by province, depending on what province they were living in.

It is interesting to note that in long-term care facilities, residents got 3% of the total COVID cases, yet that resulted in 43% of deaths from COVID. For instance, in Ontario, the incidence of death in long-term care facilities was 13 times higher than for the average 69-year-olds living in the community. What does that tell us? It tells us that there is a definite association between long-term care facilities and deaths and outbreaks due to COVID.

We know that 54% of long-term care facilities in Canada are private, and what we have seen is that many of them are not only private but for-profit. Following the first year of COVID, we got a report from the 4th Canadian Division's joint task force. If members will recall, we sent in the armed forces to help in some of these long-term care facilities. We also had a report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, or CIHI, as it is called. Both of these were scathing reports. They sounded like something out of a horror movie.

We heard that many of the aides who worked in these areas did not have any real training. They did not have any ongoing medical education or health education training. Many of them did not follow protocols and many were not registered. Many of them were also not able to provide the care they were supposed to be providing.

We found that cleanliness was a huge issue, according to those two reports. There were cockroaches in these areas and people did not take care of residents who soiled themselves. They laid in their soil, sometimes for a whole day.

We found that the ability to give medication was compromised. Medication was often outdated in the facilities, and for the people who were getting medication, it was not even working for them. We also found out that cross-contamination was huge. Many persons who were working in these areas would go from one patient to another without changing their personal protective equipment and without washing their hands, causing cross-contamination.

We heard some horror stories. We heard about the abuse of these patients, where if they complained of pain or decided that they needed help, quite often they would get pushed roughly and handled badly. However, it was the lack of any protocol to deal with the pandemic and an epidemic that was very frightening in some of these facilities.

These facilities are run by the provinces. Long-term care facilities are a provincial jurisdiction. What can the federal government do? What we can do is make those people who own or manage these facilities liable with a penalty under the Criminal Code for the failure to provide the appropriate care by any medical standard whatsoever.

Let us remember that there was burnout at these long-term care facilities. There was also the fact that many of the people who worked in these facilities were being paid less than equivalent medical personnel in other facilities of any kind.

We have just thrown seniors under the bus in many of these long-term care facilities, and we saw that with the deaths from COVID. I think we should be ashamed that, in Canada, we have a 69% COVID death rate in vulnerable adults versus 41% in any other country in the world. We need to do something about it. We are saying that we should make accountable anyone who manages such a facility, or owns such a facility, who did not have any of the protocols and did not do anything about cross-contamination.

We found out that the reason a lot of the aides were not doing the kinds of things they needed to do with personal protective equipment was that they were told that they should not spend money and that they should use it once, twice or three times. We know that is not how to deal with contamination.

Some of this was all about saving money. Some of it was about being scared. Some of it was about not knowing what to do and not having sufficient protocols and procedures. I really believe that we need to work with the provinces to create new sets of protocols and a real set of standardization of care for persons in long-term care facilities.

We need to make those who run or own those facilities very accountable under the Criminal Code. We could have the same penalties as under the section of the Criminal Code for the abuse of children or for failure to provide care for children who are vulnerable. We need to do this now for seniors.

I think that most of us know that COVID-19 is not our last pandemic. We know that with globalization, with people travelling everywhere, anyhow at any time, the cross-contamination of disease from one jurisdiction or one country to another can create what we now call pandemics. Pandemics are happenings, and pandemics are here to stay.

We need to be very clear about setting clear accountability and clear penalties for those who fail to provide care for vulnerable adults, which is the first thing. Then, as most of you will know, we need to also look at how we work with provinces to provide a pan-Canadian standard of care and a clear standard of care for many of these facilities. We know that 54% of them are for-profit organizations and are private sector organizations, and they do not have the appropriate ability to take care of adults.

Members who know a senior person or a vulnerable adult, whether they be disabled or senior, who actually perished or was harmed irrevocably under COVID-19 in one of these facilities would support this bill, because they know that it is important. If we do not care for the vulnerable among us, if we allow people to make money off people's vulnerability, if we allow people not to take due care and not to have compassion and the best quality of care for those who live in their long-term care facilities as adults, then we are failing, and we are failing badly.

I hope members will support this bill, because I think it is absolutely necessary. It is currently the only way the federal government can take care of this problem. It will take a while to negotiate with provinces. It will take a while to look at standards of care. It will take a while to do that, but in the interim, those who fail to provide appropriate care for vulnerable adults living in long-term care facilities will be penalized under the law, under sections 214 and 215 of the Criminal Code.