Health Committee on April 23rd, 2026

[Christine Donaldson]

I'm sorry. I do not have any insight or commentary to add to that question.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Bailey.

Ms. Jaczek, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for your testimony to date.

As I'm sure you know, the goal of this particular study is to provide the federal government with very practical, focused recommendations on how to improve pharmaceutical sovereignty in Canada. You've given us some hints of this already during your testimony, but starting with you, Monsieur Thibeault, could you give us one or two absolute priority areas from your perspective to assist us?

[Glenn Thibeault]

Thank you for the opportunity to put forward recommendations.

We've been very clear about the opportunity presented through the life sciences fund and the defence industrial strategy. There is $84 billion, if I'm recalling correctly, and we could utilize those dollars to implement a lot of the things in the recommendations that we're talking about.

We would like to designate insulin, glucagon and other essential diabetes therapies as critical medicines under a formal pharmaceutical sovereignty framework aligned with that strategy and that fund. Leverage the life sciences fund to provide capital investment for domestic insulin manufacturing. Establish public-private partnerships, with government providing strategic investment and guaranteed procurement, which is the same model that already works in defence and in critical minerals. Expand domestic fill-finish and active pharmaceutical ingredient capacity through targeted funding and regulatory support.

We would also like to see the creation of strategic reserves for essential diabetes medicines to buffer against supply disruptions and act as safeguards to protect Canadian supply from competing international demand.

Those are some of the recommendations we would like to bring forward.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Donaldson, perhaps you could give us your top two recommendations. I have a feeling you may want to talk a bit about the critical, essential list and the framework. We've heard that a few times. Given your position and what you do, I imagine you have some expertise on that piece.

[Christine Donaldson]

You did hear me speak earlier about the data strategy, which I think is paramount to many of the other recommendations we have for building transparency and the national coordination of the data that we own.

You're absolutely right that we do not have the capacity to develop a fully sufficient pharmaceutical strategy in Canada. It is targeted. It needs to be a coordinated approach that envelops.... We use words such as “essential”, “critical” and “vulnerable”. Often a medication could be vulnerable just based on the fact that it is sole-source or that limited alternatives are available. We saw shortages with pediatric oncology medications. These are life-saving options and alternatives, but we often do not have good choices beyond first-line therapies. As a health care practitioner, I know the worst possible outcome is to know that there is a shortage that impacts my patients and that I have to go to a patient or caregiver and explain that there is a reason they cannot receive the very best medication for their need.

It's about the criticality and, layered onto that, the vulnerability. We really are getting down to the data piece that can help drive those discussions. Again, make sure the investments in those strategies are very focused.

Lastly, it's all about procurement and the strategies that we use, because again, price alone should not be the driving factor. We are proud that many of the contracts we have for Canada have sustainability, supply resilience and other factors built into the scoring capability so that we make sure that we have a diverse and more sustainable health care supply chain.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Dr. Leclerc, you've talked already about funding. During our study on antimicrobial resistance, we heard about a push-pull mechanism as an incentive for companies to produce drugs here in Canada when the drugs are perhaps critical but are used only in small quantities. Do you have any comments in that regard?

[Denis Leclerc]

There is a big advantage for companies that are involved in this to profit from what is currently available at the university. The investment from Médicament Québec that we benefit from allows us to regroup ourselves and really focus on what the company needs. This is where we can make a difference.

Sometimes we don't need to develop a huge process. We can answer very specific questions as needed by a company producing these compounds, and it could allow us to produce a drug faster or more easily or accelerate its development.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Monsieur Leclerc. That's good.

We will now go to the next person on the list. It's Monsieur Blanchette-Joncas for the Bloc, for two and a half minutes.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Thibeault, you've explained clearly to everyone here that there is no domestic production of insulin in Canada. If we wanted to take concrete short-term steps toward pharmaceutical sovereignty, which medications should we prioritize for local production? Should insulin be one of the priorities?

[Glenn Thibeault]

Thank you for your question.

French is difficult for me, so I'll answer in English.

I absolutely believe that insulin and other vulnerable medications—my colleague and I use a lot of the same words—should be produced here in Canada.

How do you tell a small child that the process they're about to go through will lead to death? It means they're going to lose their vision. Their kidneys are going to fail. If they get a cut on their foot, that foot is going to turn into an abscess, which could then mean an amputation. That's all going to happen before they die.

I can't overemphasize it: Insulin is critical for people to survive. Right now, there are 60 to 100 people in this country who rely on animal insulin to survive, and the company in the U.K. started to say, “We're not going to be making that for you anymore.” That was a crisis for those people. We have a small resolution, but unfortunately we can't make it here in Canada yet, and I would like to see that changed.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

You mentioned the shortage in 2024. Can you explain the effects this had on certain people? We hope no one died as a result.

[Glenn Thibeault]

Thank you for the question.

In 2024, there was a shortage of injectable glucagon, which is used in extreme cases of hypoglycemia. That means someone who's going through DKA will crash, with all of the complications that come with that. When we had that shortage, Health Canada designated it as a tier three shortage. While we were searching for that, there was panic among the community, and understandably so.

We now get our supply from a company in the U.S. that provides the sole supply for the country. They have yet to meet the standards of having a DIN and using both official languages. It's extremely important. They're not meeting that, but they have us. We don't have any other supply—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I'm sorry, but you're going well over time. Can you elaborate on that in the next question, please? I'm sure the next questioner will allow you to do that.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Madam Chair, would it be possible to allow the witness to provide a written response? It's a rather complex question, and I think it would be important to have more details.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Would you do that, please? Send it to the clerk, and we'll send it on to the members. Thank you very much.

I now go to the next person, who is Mr. Strauss, for five minutes.

[Matt Strauss, Conservative, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Thibeault, it was unknown to me until your presentation that Canada, the land in which insulin was invented, currently doesn't manufacture any insulin. That's a pretty embarrassing fact. I'd like to dive into the root cause of that with you. I think there might be a hint in the second story you told, about animal insulin. Maybe 60 to 100 people in Canada can't tolerate anything else.

After you said that, I looked it up. There's a Globe and Mail article you're quoted in, so I imagine you've seen it. It describes how the former supplier of animal insulin in Canada has modernized by moving from providing it in vials to providing it in cartridges. Health Canada has required them to apply to get regulatory approval to deliver the same medicine in a different package.

Would you agree with me that this seems like something Health Canada maybe should have waived for the benefit of the 60 to 100 people who have been using that medicine for their whole lives?

[Glenn Thibeault]

There was a follow-up article about Wockhardt agreeing to work with Health Canada in addressing that issue. The good news is that we have a short-term solution.

On a broader scale, we need to start looking at these vulnerabilities and finding ways we can address them here locally. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of red tape, which, in government and politics, we talk about eliminating.

I would love to find ways to support people in getting the medicines they need. Health Canada has rules and regulations, and I understand that they need to follow those. We then have to start listening to the people who are.... This is their lives. There's one family that has a 14-year-old daughter. I know endocrinologists and others will say, “We can find something for you”, but how do you tell someone who lives in northern Saskatchewan who doesn't have an endocrinologist and doesn't have a doctor...? There's a bigger context that we need to discuss.

[Matt Strauss, Conservative, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Something that was crazy to me in this story—and I read only the first article—is that Health Canada demands $50,000 to $300,000 as the application fee. The company has to provide the data to show that, yes, it's the same thing in a different package, and has to say, “Here's our $300,000 application fee for you to review our application.”

That seems extraordinary, almost crazy. Would you agree with that?

[Glenn Thibeault]

I'm sure there are rhymes and reasons that Health Canada has that in place, and we could maybe have that discussion in another study. What I'm happy about right now is that Health Canada did look at finding ways to waive all of those things to make sure that things could come into place.

[Matt Strauss, Conservative, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

The reason I bring it up is that when I've had drug makers in my office to talk about how we can manufacture more drugs in Canada, they've said that it is this regulatory process that chases them out, because if they have to put all of this money up just to get regulated to sell in Canada, they're not going to put the money up to manufacture in Canada. That's what I'm hearing from them.

I know you spent some time on the Hill as a member and that you were a parliamentarian in the Ontario legislature. Fundamentally, is it the Minister of Health who could waive these onerous red-tape types of things? Is it you, is it me or is it the Minister of Health who has carriage over these sorts of problems?

[Glenn Thibeault]

That was our next course of action in supporting these people. It was to bring this to the Minister of Health and ask for some assistance in getting this waived.

Very quickly, to your first question about insulin, we're looking at an overall picture, and we need to start looking at domestic supply and at making sure that we can do it here. I'm not able to follow the bouncing ball to answer how we eliminated it, but let's make sure that we bring it back and produce it here.

[Matt Strauss, Conservative, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

That's fantastic. I hope to hear from her on this topic as well.

Those are all my questions, Chair. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

I'm now going to Ms. Chi for five minutes, please.