Juno News - January 18, 2022


Trudeau’s health minister refuses to answer questions about Canada’s failed response to COVID-19

Mentioned
Th Ribos COVID-19 Duclos Chair Ellis
The moving COVID-19 goalposts in Quebec (Ft. Viva Frei) An honest conversation about Canada’s residential school system

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

158.96

Word count

1,006

Sentence count

66

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau speaks to the House of Commons Health committee on the impact of the Pandemic in Canada, and answers questions from the members of the Commons committee on Public Health and Public Safety.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.800 You know, certainly as Conservatives, we want to make it very, very clear that there's a failure of leadership in this government in being prepared for the pandemic and the unfortunate circumstances that have continued to persist throughout the pandemic.
00:00:14.000 The problem here, of course, is that we have lost 30,000 lives in Canada, which is also comparable to the 42,000 Canadians who died during World War II, in which we mounted a massive effort for change.
00:00:25.680 This government has not done that, and this failure of leadership has left the provinces only with the ability to have lockdowns as their primary method of treatment.
00:00:35.580 So the unfortunate thing is, is that's what we're left with as Canadians.
00:00:39.100 So, Minister Duclos, I have a few questions for you, sir.
00:00:42.120 Before the pandemic began, acute care bed occupancy, according to the OECD, in Canada was 91.6%.
00:00:49.360 Only two countries were worse. Are you aware of this problem, sir?
00:00:52.140 Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Member Ellis.
00:00:58.460 I obviously, I also share the knowledge and the sadness of these 30,000 people having died.
00:01:06.700 This being said, because of the hard work we made, we did together, we avoided the situation that we saw in many other countries, including in our southern border.
00:01:17.840 Now, if we had had the same death rate as in the United States, we would have ended with 90,000, 9-0 death rates.
00:01:24.760 And that's a tribute.
00:01:25.920 Yes, sir, I understand that.
00:01:27.160 That's a tribute to the hard work, including the vaccination hard work that we've done over the last few months.
00:01:32.520 I would like to congratulate and thank everyone that got vaccinated in the last few months, and everyone that did the work to get those people vaccinated.
00:01:39.920 Sir, I asked you a question very specifically, and this is answer period, not question period.
00:01:46.280 Were you aware that the acute care bed occupancy was 91.6% in Canada in pre-pandemic days?
00:01:54.460 So, two things on that.
00:01:55.840 The first thing that we know is vaccination is going to remain the key.
00:01:59.480 We want people…
00:02:00.340 Sir, I don't think I asked you anything about vaccinations.
00:02:02.960 Sir, the second answer is that we have provided $63 billion exactly for that purpose, purposes of increasing abilities and capacity in our healthcare units, including the ICU units, obviously.
00:02:17.520 During the election campaign, your party promised to hire 7,500 new physicians, nurses and nurse practitioners.
00:02:24.840 And how many of these have been hired since the election, September 21st?
00:02:28.680 We have indeed promised a total of $25 billion additional to what we have invested during COVID-19, which I repeated, about $63 billion just to protect the health and safety…
00:02:41.140 Just the bodies, sir, not the numbers.
00:02:42.640 Just the bodies.
00:02:44.800 That involves a total of about $6 billion for primary care access to a family doctor, $7 billion to try to…
00:02:53.340 How many have been hired, sir?
00:02:55.000 How many of the 7,500 have been hired?
00:02:58.680 7,500 people.
00:03:00.260 How many have been hired?
00:03:02.460 Simple question.
00:03:03.660 Even more…
00:03:04.660 Let me be even more clear.
00:03:06.600 $63 billion invested until now with obviously thousands of nurses and doctors that are being paid and being recruited and being provided with the appropriate care that they need.
00:03:17.420 Sir, how many new hires since September 21st that your government promised?
00:03:22.560 So $63 billion, that's obviously of great substance and great value to my colleagues.
00:03:28.220 That's not bodies.
00:03:29.020 And they have been able to not only to recruit but to maintain and more and equally importantly to provide the working conditions that they deserve to look after so many others.
00:03:39.340 Those are people that are there, sir.
00:03:40.700 Is it fair to say that you do not know how many people have been hired that you promised?
00:03:43.840 So not only are these people now being looked after because they need to look after so many others.
00:03:52.360 And that's why we're so pleased to add another $25 billion in our campaign to make sure that those significant investments will continue over the short and the longer term.
00:04:02.160 Yeah, I guess you're just refusing to answer my question.
00:04:05.620 I appreciate that.
00:04:06.820 Do you know that the emergency room wait times in Canada are the worst in the OECD?
00:04:10.960 And do you have a plan to change that, sir?
00:04:14.140 So without only do we obviously keep increasing and investing through the Canada health transfer, but we've also added another $11 billion just a few years ago to look after the mental health and the home care services that seniors and many others across Canada need.
00:04:30.160 We've had another $63 billion during COVID-19 to look after the emergency health care needs that the provinces and territories are faced with.
00:04:41.580 And we are adding more resources as we exit from the crisis and eventually rebuild the damage, repair the damage that the crisis has created.
00:04:49.920 Do you know how many ICU beds we have in Canada, sir?
00:04:52.360 So I would tell you that that differs obviously across provinces and territories, and that has been sustained fortunately because of the strong collaboration between provinces and territories and the federal government.
00:05:04.680 I've had six recent meetings with my health ministerial colleagues.
00:05:08.920 Now this is an important way to collaborate together and to look after the needs that so many across Canada are feeling right now in the current crisis.
00:05:17.320 Sir, are you aware that Canada has the lowest number of hospital beds out of 29, we rank 29th out of 33 states, the OECD, are you aware of that, sir?
00:05:29.780 Simply yes or no answer.
00:05:31.560 Simply yes or no would be great.
00:05:33.340 We are aware of two things.
00:05:35.180 First, not only was it a challenge before COVID-19, but obviously that challenge has been increased during COVID-19.
00:05:41.940 And that's why we look, we're continuing our efforts with provinces and territories, not only to exit from COVID-19, which is the key priority now, but as I said earlier, to repair the damages created by the crisis.
00:05:53.680 Thank you.
00:05:54.480 Thank you.
00:05:54.500 Thank you.
00:06:05.880 Thank you.
00:06:06.380 Th Ribos. 0.93
00:06:06.940 Thank you.
00:06:10.300 Thank you.