You know, it's not even that I have little confidence; it's that when we're dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, we have to have more than just confidence. We have to have certainty. We have to have real rules in place.
What alarms me so deeply about this $415-million investment the government is making in Sanofi is that there seem to be no restrictions. There seem to be no strings attached. They say they're negotiating this contract with Sanofi. Hopefully, it will mean that we'll get what we want and we'll get that priority access for Canadians, but without that being really clarified and clearly nailed down, it's just dreaming. That's a tremendous amount of money to be dreaming about.
I would also add that I think this whole way of thinking is based on a fundamental misconception that we often see on the part of people in government—that is, that the interests of government and private business are fundamentally the same. That is just wrong. The interests of government and business are really quite different. The top priority of business is profit maximization for the company. The people running the company ultimately answer to their shareholders, who want to be made richer, and I'm not even saying this to criticize private companies; this is what they're all about. On the other hand, government answers ultimately to the people, to the voters. If they don't defend the public interests that the voters want, they will end up getting defeated and kicked out of government.
My whole point is that there's a different set of interests involved. The way the Trudeau government is approaching this, throwing $415 million at Sanofi, is just way too trusting. It's based on some notion that they have the same interests that we do. They do not have the same interests. We have to be much more careful.
Even more important, we'd be much smarter to not go this private route and to instead go the public route. As we saw with Connaught, we were able to control what happened with Connaught. It turned out to be a wonderful situation. This was an enormously successful company that provided vaccines for Canadians at cost. They used their profits to reinvest in research. This was a spectacular example. I think the point is that we should be more aware of that history and more excited by what was achieved with it and more interested in investigating whether we couldn't try that again.