Thank you, Vice-Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Jeff Watson, president and CEO of Apotex Canada. Apotex greatly appreciates this important and timely opportunity to contribute to the Standing Committee on Health's study of pharmaceutical sovereignty for Canada.
There's no question that the pandemic experience, coupled with recent shifts in the international political and economic environment, heightened the urgency of having a public policy response to ensure that Canadian patients, and the health care system more broadly, continue to have access to critical generic medicines that domestic producers like Apotex manufacture.
As a Canadian company founded over 50 years ago in Toronto, Apotex is, today, a unique Canadian pharmaceutical manufacturing asset, with five FDA- and Health Canada-approved manufacturing sites employing over 6,000 employees worldwide and 4,000 here in Canada. To remain state of the art, Apotex annually spends over $500 million in Canada on its operations, and plans to invest $900 million in R and D and capital expenditures over the next five years. Importantly, while based in Ontario, Apotex is a global company providing drugs and therapeutics for millions of patients in over 70 countries. Apotex is also Canada's largest exporter of generic drugs and therapeutics to the U.S. market.
Its manufacturing facilities together with its global head office in Toronto make Apotex Canada's largest pharmaceutical company, pharmaceutical manufacturer and pharmaceutical employer. It's from this vantage point I offer perspectives in the context of the committee's study.
While likely shaped by current events, which I will address later in my remarks, the committee's study reflects a common concern among many governments, which, following the COVID-19 experience, recognized the risks of not developing pharmaceutical sovereignty. As a result of the pandemic, many countries developed and implemented strategic plans to prepare for the next pandemic-like event. Canada prudently sought to address gaps in its life sciences ecosystem through the biomanufacturing and life sciences strategy and its corresponding investments.
The Apotex pandemic experience provides valuable lessons on the importance of having a strong domestic generic pharmaceutical manufacturing sector, with companies like Apotex at its core. From the outset of the pandemic, Apotex was called upon by governments and acted unilaterally to address evolving pandemic-related health care challenges, which the company was uniquely positioned to do. Apotex quickly identified ways it could shift its manufacturing platform and supply chain to meet emerging and urgent health care needs.
For example, early in the pandemic, when sanitizer was in short supply, Apotex was able to retrofit its Brantford facility, normally a dedicated active pharmaceutical ingredient site, to manufacture hand sanitizer, which we donated to health care organizations in Canada. As a manufacturer of hydroxychloroquine, we donated two million doses of the product for clinical trials to evaluate the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19. Most importantly, when other countries came to us, we prioritized Canadian patients to ensure that we had enough product to cover those who needed the drug for other indications, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
The effective Apotex-government relationship that emerged during the pandemic ensured that Canadian patients had access to vital generic drugs and served to underscore the importance of having direct access to domestic generic manufacturing capacity during a health crisis.
We are currently experiencing a global shift. A new global pharmaceutical manufacturing landscape is emerging in jurisdictions such as the U.S. In the past six months alone, the U.S. has implemented over 10 specific measures aimed at supporting existing manufacturers and attracting companies and manufacturers from other jurisdictions.
Make Canadian pharmaceutical manufacturing a policy priority. This is why I'm happy to attend today with all of you. Given those policy incentives being adopted in the U.S. and Europe, and our overreliance on generic pharmaceuticals produced outside North America, Canada's pharmaceutical manufacturing sovereignty is at risk. Accordingly, we strongly urge the committee to recommend that the government add generic pharmaceutical manufacturing as a priority sector within the buy Canadian policy.
Apotex strongly endorses the recommendations made by the CPMEA, a colleague joining us here today, and would emphasize the need for the buy Canadian policy initiative to provide Canadian generic pharmaceutical manufacturers with a dedicated regulatory approval process and establish a preference for Canadian-manufactured generic products—