Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have just a couple of things.
Interestingly, Ms. Sidhu just commented on this figure in terms of the Prime Minister announcing that we're going to get 80 million doses. I noticed that she said “by the end of September”. Again, this is part of the confusion I have about whether it's “by September” or “by the end of September” and this increasingly ever-changing target. It's hard to get clear communications from this government, and I think clarity is very important to Canadians in a time of crisis.
What's interesting.... There is a point I wanted to make in terms of scaring off these pharmaceutical companies. One thing we all have to remember is that the money that went into developing these vaccines was, by and large, public. In fact, if I understand correctly, Moderna was 100% funded by United States taxpayers. This is not a question of these pharmaceutical companies having spent billions of dollars of their own money and spending years on their own in taking risks to develop these vaccines so that they'd have an expectation of private development and hoarding of the technology and information. These vaccines were developed through public dollars, by and large. We're not talking about hypertension drugs or baldness cures or any of the private ones where you could legitimately argue that these pharmaceutical companies developed these on their own and have a right to control them.
We have a worldwide pandemic, and I'm hearing Liberals talk about the private pharmaceutical development model standing in the way—as basically a boulder in the stream—of this development, as the whole world breathlessly waits for more vaccines and we're waiting to see if Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca can produce enough.
Some of my colleagues on this committee and I have had a lot of talks about the concept of compulsory licensing, which is exactly what should be used in this situation. Compulsory licensing means this: When a private patent holder has the patent to a life-saving medication and is either unwilling or unable to make that medication available and life or death is on the line, governments have the right to act on those patents.
Here, we are talking about the normal right of expectation of a couple of pharmaceutical companies that might get mad at us if we reveal the contracts they signed, when we reveal the contracts to produce life-saving medication that the whole world needs, which we paid for. That's a shocking abdication of public responsibility. If this government did negotiate such a right with these companies, I think Canadians have a right to know that. I think Dr. Powlowski overstated my brilliance on this, maybe, but I will reiterate: Let's see the confidentiality clauses, then. Let's see exactly what this government agreed to.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I just have to if we're playing the blame game. The Conservatives did, in my view, make a terrible mistake in privatizing Connaught Labs in 1986, and they deserve every legitimate criticism that can be levelled against that. For decades, Connaught Labs had provided cheap insulin to Canadians.
By the way, I'm going to stop for a moment and note that here we are, in 2021, at the 100th anniversary of the Canadian discovery of insulin in this country at U of T, by Dr. Banting and Dr. Best. I want to throw out some thanks to my colleague Sonia Sidhu for her championing of the diabetes strategy. It was Connaught Labs that made sure they honoured the objective of Dr. Banting and Dr. Best to make insulin available not for private profit, but as a discovery for the world. That saved millions of lives by allowing diabetics to get access to cheap insulin.
Connaught Labs also, by the way, played a role in vaccination—I believe for diphtheria. Dr. Powlowski is a doctor, so I'm not going to go further because he'll know what the other diseases were. This was a public manufacturer, so what a colossal policy failure for the Conservatives to privatize that and to begin the process of leaving Canada—to this day—in the position that we never should have been in, which is that we don't have domestic capacity, as a G7 country, to produce life-saving vaccines and medications.
I'm going to turn my attention to the Liberals, because they play their role in this too. Since 1986, by my count, Liberals have been in power 19 years, 13 of them in majority governments, over seven terms. What did they do? Did they bring back a public drug manufacturer? No. Did they do anything to change that neo-liberal course of pharmaceutical policy that was set in motion by the Mulroney government, where we gave longer patents to pharmaceutical companies and signed trade deals that protected, globally, pharmaceutical profits?
The Liberals won't even go ahead and implement their own PMPRB reforms that they know are the right thing to do. They backed off three times because of big pharma pressure. There has been zero change by the Liberal government since 1986 to address the problematic situation that the Mulroney government put us into. I don't think it lies in the mouths of any Liberals to point fingers at Conservatives. A pox on both the Conservatives and the Liberals for this position. For 150 years, these two parties have been in power in this country.
Here we are, in 2021, and we don't have the ability to produce a life-saving vaccine. Do you know who does? Argentina, Mexico, India, Australia and Japan do. Argentina was an economic basket case 10 years ago. We're a member of the G7, the most exclusive economic club on earth. We're one of the wealthiest nations on earth. We're one of the best societies on earth, and our successive federal governments have let us get into this position. Frankly, that's a shameful abdication of responsibility for which both the Conservatives and the Liberals owe an explanation to the Canadian public.
I think that's all I want to say, at this point. My final conclusion is that nobody wants to see vaccine production or distribution delayed or interrupted, but again, I don't think having us see delivery schedules and some basic provisions of the contracts that this government has signed on behalf of Canadians will do that. Also, I'm not hearing any real response to the governance value of transparency. At one time, this government really believed in that. In fact, they used that as a significant wedge issue to convince Canadians as to why they should reject the previous Conservative government. They made a pledge to be more transparent. Again, by default, we don't even have....
We shouldn't have to explain why we want transparency. Mr. Trudeau said it's an expectation. If the only argument I'm hearing from this government is, oh, my goodness, the big bad pharmaceutical companies might not give us our doses of vaccines if we reveal redacted contracts to Canadians, then I'm going to say that those contracts were horrifically negotiated. Also, do you know what you tell those big pharmaceutical companies? You tell them we'll compulsory-license them and we'll produce those vaccine doses here in Canada. Do you know why? I'll tell you what's more important than big pharmaceutical profits and interests—the health and lives of Canadians. That trumps privacy and private profit.
Quite honestly, where I'm going to conclude.... We haven't talked about this in this committee either. I still have not received a real answer from this government as to why Canada is opposing India, South Africa and Brazil's request to the WTO to temporarily relax TRIPS rules to make this technology and intellectual property available for the entire world to start producing. We could unleash the massive ability of the Indian and Brazilian pharmaceutical industries to produce vaccines by the billions, but they just don't have the technology and IP.
Why are we continuing to use a private sector drug development model in the context of a global pandemic, when we know that to do so...? The whole world is waiting for these private companies to ramp up production. Why are we restricting production just to them? Why aren't we busting open the industrial capacity of the entire world to produce vaccines? Lest you think this is an issue only of economics, it's not.
I'm going to conclude by saying this. This is a global virus. We just passed a motion in this committee earlier today to study dangerous variants, variants that, if this virus mutates, could render the vaccines that we have less effective or even completely ineffective.
Do you know what? Making sure that high-risk individuals in every country of the world are vaccinated is not just a question of morality; it's a question of self-interest. All it takes is one person from Cameroon with a dangerous new variant to hop on a plane and get off in Toronto to become a super-spreader and globally infect and introduce a dangerous variant into Canada against which the vaccines that we have may be less effective or even ineffective.
I want to hear from my Liberal colleagues as to whether they support their Liberal government's opposition at the WTO to making the global COVID vaccines widely available or they agree that this is really the private preserve of the Pfizers, Modernas and AstraZenecas of the world.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.