Foreign Affairs Committee on April 29th, 2021

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Yes, of course.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

That's great.

Have you made the announcement to Canada's international co-operation partners on the ground?

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Are you asking me whether we are going to make the announcement to Canada's partners on the ground?

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Yes.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

If we are giving vaccines through COVAX, COVAX will distribute the doses, not Canada's partners, such as civil society organizations.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

So you're not going to call them.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

I'm not sure I understood the question correctly.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Canada will actually have surplus doses. That's what I heard in the House of Commons. I'm not talking about COVAX.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

No, no—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe, I'm sorry, but your time is up.

We'll have to go to Ms. McPherson.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Could I finish my answer very quickly?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Go ahead very quickly, Ms. Gould.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Canada may have surplus doses. If that's the case, we'll donate those vaccines to COVAX, which can send them to less fortunate countries.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Madam Minister.

Ms. McPherson, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you again to the witnesses for being here. It's nice to see Mr. Tabah here. I worked with him prior to being elected.

I have a lot of questions about this. I do thank the minister for coming and speaking to us about the COVAX vaccines. This is at the behest of the motion I had brought forward with regard to Foreign Affairs, looking for more clarity on this, so I will start with a series of questions about COVAX. If we have time, I'll ask about the TRIPS waiver as well.

The minister has explained how COVAX works in some detail. Unfortunately, what I think we haven't been able to unpack here today is how the COVAX vaccine works if other countries, wealthy countries, aren't also making side deals with pharmaceutical companies for bilateral agreements.

Could the minister talk about how the Canadian government has reconciled the fact that it has made bilateral purchasing agreements—bilateral agreements equivalent to 10 times the doses, from I've heard, that Canadians will require—despite the fact that Dr. Tedros publicly announced that these advance purchases undermine COVAX's ability to secure adequate doses? The WHO is saying that because we've done this, because Canada has secured these doses, COVAX won't work as well. How does the minister reconcile that?

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

First of all, thank you, Ms. McPherson, for the question and for moving this motion. I think it's a really important one and I'm very glad to be here on this issue.

With regard to COVAX and bilateral deals, when COVAX was created last June, it was intended to serve as a stopgap to ensure that vaccines went to the developing world. Its objective was to provide vaccines for 20% of the populations of countries that joined COVAX. COVAX is on track to deliver this by the end of 2021, which was its objective from the beginning, and in fact it looks as though it will be able to deliver up to 30%.

When it was conceived, it was precisely to deal with this issue, and it locked in that supply for COVAX member countries right from the beginning and recognized that—

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

You will know that I have very little time, but you're not in fact answering why the Canadian government made bilateral agreements.

I hate to interrupt you, Minister, but I'm running out of time.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

It's okay.

I was getting there in the sense that COVAX was always intended to try to protect those doses, recognizing that wealthier countries would be entering into bilateral deals. It was trying to protect that supply to provide doses for the most vulnerable frontline health care workers in developing countries.

Canada entered into bilateral deals because we also recognized back last summer that we didn't know which vaccines were going to be successful. Some of the deals we have are for the same vaccines that are part of COVAX. Some are for different ones. One that is the same is AstraZeneca. Another that is the same is Novavax. Moderna is not one of those, and Pfizer wasn't at the beginning either. Not knowing which one would be successful and knowing that our objective was to ensure that Canadians got access to vaccines, we have had a diversified portfolio.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Of course, everyone's objective is to make sure that's the case, but, of course, we as government—or you as government and I as opposition—need to also consider the global implications of not making sure that other countries get access to the vaccines, because it puts Canadians at greater risk if we allow variants to develop. It destroys our global economic recovery if it takes until 2024 for some countries to get access to that 20% piece.

You talk about making those bilateral agreements, but my understanding is that Canada was making bilateral agreements after the WHO explicitly asked countries to stop making those agreements, particularly with the Serum Institute of India, for example. I question whether or not it's actually accurate to say that it is intended for us to take all 10 times what we can get our hands on and to leave the rest of the countries to develop these very, very dangerous variants.

You talk about COVAX and the intention that it be 20%. We know that falls far short of the 60% or 70% that would be needed for herd immunity, so I'm curious why the government is delaying and saying that it is something it's thinking about. It's asking questions that we know it already has the answers to in terms of the intellectual property waiver.

So, knowing that—and these are your words as well as my own—none of us are safe until all of us are safe, what would be the rationale for not waiving intellectual property rights? These pharmaceutical companies use public dollars, and they're making billions of dollars of profit this year. Why wouldn't we be able to waive those intellectual property rights so that other countries could reach that 60% or 70%? Doing that will protect Canadians, protects lives, and protect our economy. I just don't get it, Minister.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Ms. McPherson.

You know, I agree with you that we have to protect everyone. That's why we have been, from the get-go, one of the top contributors to and most avid champions of COVAX and this really unique initiative. Forty-nine million doses have been delivered to 120 countries, and they are on track to deliver 1.3 billion, that 20%, by the end of this year.

Just on the TRIPS waiver, as I was saying in French—hopefully in French before—Canada has not been opposed to this. We have actually been a very constructive player, but, as you likely know, the WTO operates on consensus. Recognizing that there is a bit of an impasse in the WTO, we've been very supportive of the work of the new director general, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, who is proposing a third way, because it's partly intellectual property but a lot of it is also about manufacturing and transfer of technology and knowledge and know-how, and so Minister Ng—

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Would you feel comfortable—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Ms. McPherson, I apologize. We'll have to leave it there.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

—in saying that you support the TRIPS waiver?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Ms. McPherson, I'm sorry. We'll have to leave it there. Your time is up.

I now turn the floor over to Mr. Chong, please, for five minutes.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister, for appearing in front of us today.

I'd like to highlight a small developing country, to build on what Ms. McPherson was talking about, to illustrate through comparison and contrast why the concerns she and others have raised are so relevant to the whole COVAX issue.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines is a very small country in the Caribbean. It has only about 100,000 people. It's not large enough to have its own full embassy here in Canada. It has a consulate general in Toronto. It was recently hit by the eruption of a volcano, La Soufrière, which continues to wreak havoc over St. Vincent and the Grenadines as well as some of the neighbouring Caribbean islands.

The government there estimates that they need hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild. Over 40 centimetres of ash have fallen down into that community. The UN has put a call out for some $30 million in emergency assistance to help the poor residents struggling with this natural disaster. Governments like the United Kingdom government have given over $1.3 million Canadian in aid to the island.

In that context, it's really difficult to jibe that with Canada's use of the COVAX facility. As you know, the COVAX advance market commitment provides access to vaccines for countries like St. Vincent and the Grenadines. To date, they've received 24,000 doses from that facility. Canada has taken 317,000 doses out of the COVAX facility—Canada, a developed country and one of the wealthiest countries in the world. That's in contrast to what Mr. Fonseca pointed out, which is the Republic of France's recent announcement that they are donating half a million doses by June to the COVAX facility.

In that context, I think that's why we are raising concerns about how Canada has utilized the COVAX facility.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines is like many other developing countries. It doesn't have significant resources. The World Bank estimates that an additional 150 million people within the last 12 months have been plunged back into extreme poverty, undoing decades' worth of progress.

It seems to me that the government's mismanagement of vaccine procurement has really led to the situation where we, as a G7 country, are taking advantage of a facility that other advanced countries are not, one that was primarily intended to assist those people in the developing world.

I guess I don't have a question here. It's just more of a broad comment to illustrate what I'm talking about. St. Vincent and the Grenadines has just received its first delivery of 24,000 doses in the shadow of a volcano that continues to spew ash that's severely disrupting the lives and livelihoods of residents on those islands, yet Canada has withdrawn 317,000 doses from the COVAX facility while G7 countries like France donate 500,000 doses to that facility.

Mr. Chair, I don't have any questions here. I just wanted to make that comment.

Thank you very much.