Thank you so much for the shout-out, MP Green. I appreciate it. I've been at committee four times in my first year of being a member of Parliament. It's amazing.
I used to teach contract law, so it gives me great pleasure to be able to discuss this particular topic with you.
In particular, we should note that under our agreements with each supplier, we purchased a base number of doses. From Moderna, for example, we purchased 20-million doses. We also built flexibility into our contracts to enable us, once we have approval from Health Canada or we see that a vaccine is extremely successful with a particular demographic group, to go back to that company and say, “Look, we have options in this contract, and we want to exercise them now.” Then they would sell us additional doses of the vaccine.
That's what “up to” means. The “up to” means that we have the ability to exercise additional options if we choose to do so.