Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee as a private individual.
My name is Steven Hoffman, and I'm a professor of global health, law and political science at York University, where I direct the global strategy lab.
Today I'll speak about a collateral impact of the pandemic that I think this committee has likely heard less about, namely the significant damage this pandemic has caused for our global governance systems. That's bad for Canadians' health because there are increasing numbers of health threats that defy national boundaries and depend on international co-operation to be addressed: antimicrobial resistance, air pollution, climate change, microplastics, radiation, the list goes on.
Since Canada cannot tackle these transnational health threats alone, we are especially vulnerable to them as one of the most globalized countries in the world. That means that we have a special vulnerability to any weakening of our global governance systems and, as I'd argue, a special obligation to help strengthen them. Canadians' health depends on it.
To draw this conclusion, I will first point to the fact that our existing global governance systems are predicated on a model of independent sovereign nation states that dates back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. This means we are literally using 17th-century social technology to address 21st-century threats.
This way of organizing ourselves might have worked when pathogens would cross continents over the course of decades, but today pathogens travel across the world in a matter of hours. It takes just 18 hours for a virus to fly from China to Toronto, where I'm based, and that includes a nice stop in Vancouver along the way.
Even more important than understanding what COVID-19 has revealed about our weak global governance systems is how COVID-19 is further breaking them. The reality is that trust is fundamental, yet today we are witnessing the greatest erosion of that trust that I've seen in my lifetime. I am speaking about the horribly inequitable global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Rich countries are getting vaccinated, while poorer countries have mostly been shut out. Of course, this is not new. Certainly for me, it brings back some bad memories of the HIV crisis 20 years ago when richer countries had access to antiretrovirals, while poorer countries went without. A whole lot of people needlessly died, and those who didn't became angry, distrusting and resentful.
I make these pointed remarks not as a critique of a particular government or even of a particular country. Rather, fundamentally, I blame our global governance systems, which are in desperate need of strengthening. Our current systems make it very difficult for elected governments not to prioritize the short-term needs of their citizens above others, yet considering this virus will continue to evolve and new variants of concern will continue to emerge, global vaccine inequity will lead to suboptimal health outcomes for Canadians, in addition to humanity more broadly.
Of course, there is some good news. Canada is not only leading the world in first-dose vaccinations, but we are also one of the most generous countries in pledging 100 million vaccine doses to COVAX as of yesterday. That's great, but I think it's also a sad reflection on our global governance systems when actions taken by Canada and its G7 peers can simultaneously be both generous and woefully inadequate at the same time. Even one billion vaccine doses from G7 countries means that just 5% to 6% of people in low-income countries will get vaccinated this calendar year. That means that as we prepare to go back to normal, nearly everyone in poorer countries knows that won't be their reality in 2021, and probably not in 2022 either.
Mr. Chair, we are witnessing and are active beneficiaries of one of the starkest injustices of our lives. Like with HIV, this injustice is breeding anger, distrust and resentment, both towards the global governance systems that enable it, as well as towards the people, like us, who benefit from it.
The consequences of this injustice and our broken global governance systems will be with us, Canadians, for decades to come. We will all be less healthy in the long term because of it.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before this committee.
I look forward to your questions.