Indoor Mask Requirements and Vaccine Boosters - Motion Under Rule 5(5)

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I thank the Leader of the Official Opposition for bringing this to the floor of the Legislature.

Like many of us, I suspect, I have been getting calls from many physicians, epidemiologists, and scientists who simultaneously feel they have an ethical duty to speak about the policy decisions that the government is making and express a feeling of being muzzled by the structure of the Nova Scotia Health Authority. It's against that backdrop that I will make these comments and that I will encourage the government in their policy decisions to again start to rely on the advice of health care professionals.

We, I think, had a rare distinction in Nova Scotia of being among the best in North America at managing COVID-19. As anyone in this House will tell you, I rarely agreed with Premier McNeil, but because he made the choice early to listen to Public Health and to take advantage of the expertise at his disposal and to act according to their directions, we fared incredibly well. I want to be clear - we fared very well not because our restrictions were harsh; we fared well because our restrictions were smart. (Applause)

I think it's really important to note that seemingly as soon as the government stopped listening to Public Health and there has become what appears from the outside - and I'm only on the outside, I'm not in any of these conversations - to be a notable schism between Public Health advice and policy decisions, which I think as my colleague alluded to, could only be based on polling.

It's true: people want COVID-19 to be over. We all want COVID-19 to be over. But as soon as there became a Delta, a gap between Public Health advice and policy-making, we've seen our cases rise, so much in fact that we are now distinguished as being among one of the worst jurisdictions in North America. That should be concerning to everyone.

When I say one of the worst, what does that mean? That means that almost every day, Nova Scotians are dying of COVID-19, Nova Scotians who don't need to die of COVID-19. Nova Scotians are catching this disease and they are having very severe outcomes - death, severe illness, loss of employment, inability to work, loss of livelihood. All of this has not only real-world and ultimate impacts, but also financial consequences, I would argue.

I want to say that the way we prevented this in the past, and the way that we could prevent this, isn't a black-and-white thing, it's not a zero-sum game, it's not we press the panic button and lock down, or we just let people live their lives. This is the narrative that we have been hearing from the Premier and it's very disturbing because it actually simplifies an issue that is not simple.

I again want to stress that with small interventions - and I will say I appreciate the government's decision to extend the mask mandate in schools. I think that was smart; I think that was based on science. I've got three kids in public school. I'm not worried about the public health impacts of them wearing masks for another month. I think it is far outweighed by the positive health impacts.

Wearing masks, being thoughtful about your social circle, all of the things that we've learned to do, that's not panic, that's not a lockdown. That's common sense and that's keeping each other safe.

I think that what I'm trying to point to is that we are seeing extraordinarily contradictory messaging from leadership. I think the key to our success was that we had this unified voice that although sometimes - obviously we all take issue with various things, but we trusted the voice of leadership throughout the pandemic, and that trust is eroding. That's partly a global phenomenon around conspiracy theories and whatever else, but we have a choice to either go into that flow or not.

I think we hear "Keep your circle small," then we see an ad campaign that says to get back out there, and we hear that you should wear a mask when you are indoors, in public situations, and then we hear that if it's comfortable for you, wear a mask. Then we hear that Nova Scotians have the tools they need, but we don't have the tools we need, we don't have the data we need to understand our level of risk.

Again, credit where credit is due: We're pleased that the government reinstituted the temporary Paid Sick Leave program. It's not enough but it's a start. Before that we didn't even have the opportunity to stay home, which we were being told to do.

I think it's really important again to emphasize the impact on our health care system. We have hundreds and hundreds of NSHA employees off right across the system - those are staff. We were told yesterday that the solution is overstaffing, which doesn't make any sense to me, but maybe someone else can figure that out. We've got tens of thousands of people waiting for delayed surgeries, and those are only the surgeries that were scheduled. There are thousands and thousands and thousands more surgeries that need to happen that weren't even scheduled because diagnostics is so backed up.

Our health care system is on the brink. I think any assertion to the contrary is just not accurate, based on what I've been hearing. I think what's happening is we're hearing this acquiescence, or this narrative that this is where we are, it's going to become endemic - this is how it is across the country. You know what? This is how it is across the country, but the rest of the country actually suffered greater disease, higher death counts and more lockdowns than we did - because we did it our own way. We did it in a Nova Scotian way. We kept everyone's health and well-being at the forefront, and we made it a collective conversation.

By really emphasizing the notion that we were all in this together - I would submit that members of this House did this, the government did this, health leadership did this - we were successful.

I think that the current challenge that we find ourselves in - the skyrocketing COVID-19 cases that we see, the deaths we see every day, severe illness that people are experiencing in Nova Scotia - is directly attributable to this shift from an idea of we're all in it together, I participate in these public health restrictions so that you can be safe. That's not the story anymore.

Now it's a private story. It's well, if you feel comfortable wearing a mask, wear a mask. If you think you need a mask to be safe, you wear a mask. If you're more comfortable in a smaller group, you be in the smaller group. But that's not why we make these choices.

The only way through this is together and the only way through this is to have a sense of collective responsibility, and for our government to model a narrative of collective responsibility. How they do that - that's the job of Public Health. Do that by following Public Health's instructions and do the ad campaign to support the health advice that we get. Don't do an ad campaign of people clinking forks. I don't even know what that's about. There's a picture of people clinking food on each other's forks. Anyway, it's not how I eat, but maybe other people.

I think all of that is like "Get back out there." Should we? That's not what we're hearing. That's not what we're hearing from the physicians my colleague listed. That's not what we're hearing, in fact, from Dr. Strang. So who are we hearing it from? Why aren't we amplifying the messages of Public Health so that we can keep the most vulnerable among us safe? Again, we don't have the tools we need and there are many people who, number one, maybe can't follow the data that's being released, but number two, don't have control over their health. They're immunocompromised, they live in marginalized communities - there are all kinds of reasons.

I just want to close by saying that it is my view that the government has a responsibility to keep the people of this province healthy, safe, and thriving. This government ran on health care and that is the right topic, but they have inexplicably decided to abandon it in this case, and I don't know why. I would encourage them to come back to a notion of simple caring and compassionate actions that can keep us all safe. If they do that, we will rally around them.