Monday March 1, 2021
Business across Barrie-lnnisfil and Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte are concerned today as the region moves into the Grey-Lockdown zone and COVID-19 continues to profoundly impact Canadians.
Over the weekend, we have heard from dozens of business owners and people they employ expressing their fears about the decision and the impact another lockdown will have on their lives and livelihoods. We also understand that the pandemic and lockdowns are causing tremendous anxiety and impacting mental health for many in our communities.
Since Friday we have communicated regularly with MPPs Doug Downey and Andrea Khanjin sharing with them the concerns and frustrations we are hearing from our business community and residents.
As your MPs, we will continue to advocate for you and call on the federal government to provide the tools we need to get people back to work and rebuild our local economy.
Clearly, the virus is not going away and because of that, we must learn to live with and manage COVID-19 using all available tools - vaccines, rapid testing, contact tracing, isolating vulnerable individuals and those with underlying medical conditions when necessary. This is critically important in our region where we have seen the emergence of the contagious UK variant.
We have also heard from our business community that lockdowns or additional restrictions are having a profound impact on peoples lives and livelihoods and their state of mental health and should not be a default position, but one of last resort.
We are disappointed to see that today (March 1, 2021), Canada sits 58th in the world for vaccine distribution. Since the effective and expedient rollout of vaccines is the surest way to protect public health and allow businesses to fully reopen.
Canada's Conservatives have pushed the federal government for an adequate and continuous vaccine supply - the most important tool we need to get back to normal, rebuild our economy, and secure our future.
We are again calling on the federal government to provide the provinces with a steady and reliable supply of vaccines so that immunization programs can run with certainty.