Article content continued
Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said the delays are proof the Liberals have been consistently behind demand.
“There has never been a plan with this government to manufacture and secure capacity for vaccines. We were late on rapid tests, late on vaccines and each week, the news gets worse,” he said. “Canada is facing a serious vaccine shortfall, rapid tests are not being widely used and Canadians are sitting in lockdown.”
The United Kingdom has been able to push ahead with its vaccination campaign and has significant domestic production that has been scaled up in the last year. Trudeau said all countries provide lessons to learn from and noted the U.K. has fared much worse in controlling the virus.
“We recognize that the U.K. is seeing a much higher rate of infection and course of the disease than we are facing here in Canada. So there are some things that they might like to be more like Canada on, and other things we’re certainly going to learn from them.”
In a rare positive development, Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said the number of new positive cases has been consistently falling for the last three weeks. She said they have fallen to about 4,300 new cases per day across the country, half of what the number was three weeks ago.
“This is a clear sign that the difficult community based measures that were put in place to control rapid spread are having an impact,” she said.
Tam said there is still some way to go before governments should reduce restrictions. She said they have to get to a level where local authorities can keep up with testing and contact tracing to prevent another wave.
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: ryantumilty
