Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for joining us today for this important study.
As a member of the opposition, my role is to look at the government's response and to try to find ways to improve that response going forward. What I'm hearing from the testimony in this panel and the previous panel is that the Canadian government in effect undermined COVAX by agreeing to or by negotiating bilateral agreements with pharmaceutical companies.
In addition, the Canadian government failed to secure that intellectual property protection through the TRIPS waiver, so that other countries could produce their own vaccines.
The final piece of this is that we are seeing that the Canadian government has a system, in the form of the Canada's access to medicines regime, that does not work. It has not worked in the past, and it is certainly not up to the task of working right now. I've heard from organizations that have said the websites are down; the phones don't.... Nothing in that entire process is working.
As an opposition member, what I look at is the potential for us to have a different response if a future pandemic or a variant of COVID-19 were to happen.
I'd like to ask both our witnesses how confident they feel that the global response, particularly from a Canadian government perspective, would be different if we were to be in this situation again in the near or distant future.
Perhaps I could start with you, Dr. Ali.