First of all, let me thank you for your work as parliamentary secretary in helping, like all members have, to make sure we have the best strategy and policies to protect Canadians. If you would allow me, I will go back to Mr. Cumming's previous question, when he was talking about the level of preparedness.
Mr. Cumming, I apologize I didn't have enough time to be fulsome in my answer, but I want to say that we reopened the strategic innovation fund to biomanufacturing when we formed the government.
To your point, I think what all of us need to look at now is that we are building the pillars of our future resilience, so we invested in Medicago in Quebec City, and it is a significant investment, close to $173 million. We then made a significant investment in VIDO in Saskatchewan, and one in AbCellera. This week we were able to attract—and I want to emphasize for members—Novavax to Canada, because, let's be clear, every country would like to have Novavax manufacturing in their country. They chose Canada, and there's a reason why.
I also want to be fulsome with Mr. Cumming, because I did speak to the CEO of the company. Our policies, when it comes to science, investments, and ease of doing business, were key in his decision. You don't need to take it from me. You can listen to the interviews he gave in Canada.
What we will be doing together—and we're trying to accelerate this as quickly as possible—is investing in small and medium-size businesses as well. Mr. Ehsassi, and all of us members, have SMEs that want to help in our regions, in our provinces and in our towns, and I greatly welcome that. That's why we supported them with the National Research Council. We supported those that were at a stage that was, I would say, more advanced. We couldn't, for example, in terms of biomanufacturing, give them the resources to do that.
Deputy Minister Kennedy explained we did that because there are also different types of vaccines. When we look at our vaccination procurement, we see there are about 234 vaccine candidates in the world. We selected seven of the most promising based on the advice of the task force. Two of them have been approved in Canada and in most G7 countries, and deliveries are now in Canada.
When we look at the big picture, we see it in terms of both procurement and domestic scale-up of biomanufacturing. We did what we needed to do first to ensure that we were protecting the health and safety of Canadians, and at the same time, that we would be very resilient.
We're not going to stop there. I want to reassure you, Mr. Ehsassi, and other members of the committee, I'm talking to different companies. We are going to make our country resilient. We will be well prepared for whatever may come next. We will try to accelerate all these manufacturing projects to be produced safely, because I think Canadians want speed, but they also want something safe. We will do this as safely and as quickly as possible to protect the health and safety of Canadians.