Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate this opportunity to address the committee today.
I would like to talk about Canada's lack of domestic vaccine production facilities, which I think has been one of the key problems in Canada's slow vaccine rollout.
Last month the Trudeau government attempted to correct this problem by investing $415 million in the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. The idea was to help Sanofi expand its vaccine production facilities in Canada.
In my opinion, this is not the answer. This is not the solution to the problem of our limited vaccine capacity. On the contrary, I would go so far as to say it's a reckless use of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money.
In announcing the investment, the federal industry minister said that Ottawa was currently in negotiations with Sanofi over a contract that would give Canadians priority access to Sanofi's vaccines during a future pandemic, but hold on—surely it would have been better to postpone that $415-million announcement until after Sanofi had agreed to the government's terms to give Canadians priority access. Without that key term being nailed down, we really are just keeping our fingers crossed that Sanofi will deliver for us. I think in some ways this reveals just how vulnerable Canada is now that we no longer have a domestic vaccine capacity that we control.
Of course, we once did have that capacity. We had Connaught Labs, a Canadian publicly owned enterprise that was one of the world's leading vaccine producers. For seven decades, Connaught developed and produced a range of vaccines. It provided those vaccines to Canadians at cost. It provided them to other countries at affordable prices. Connaught operated without government financial support, yet it even made profits, which it reinvested in medical research. Connaught's research scientists were among the best in the world. They contributed to some of the key medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, including insulin, penicillin and a polio vaccine. Connaught even played a vital role in the World Health Organization's global vaccination campaign to rid the world of smallpox, yet despite this remarkable record, Connaught was privatized by the Mulroney government in the 1980s.
The Connaught facilities still operate today in Toronto, but they are now owned by Sanofi. In fact, Ottawa's $415-million investment in Sanofi is going to expand the old Connaught facilities, but Canada no longer has control over what happens there.
There is, of course, much to lament about the sell-off of this spectacular Canadian company and Canadian enterprise, Connaught Labs, but that is history. That is history. The key point now is that it's not too late to create a new version of Connaught. That would be a publicly owned biotech company that could produce vaccines and other medications and could be counted on to put Canada and Canadian needs first, which was what Connaught always did. Rather than investing $415 million in a private company that we don't control, we could invest that money in a company that we do control.
Next week's budget would be a perfect opportunity to announce the launch of a new publicly owned biotech enterprise. I realize that may sound ambitious, but it wasn't too ambitious for the visionary Canadians who created Connaught in the early 20th century. Let's see if we can't own that podium again.
Thank you.