Industry Committee on Feb. 4th, 2021

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Minister Champagne, you mentioned that Canada has supported vaccine production to the tune of billions of dollars. Have you obtained contractual conditions attached to that public money, that vaccine production must be in Canada?

[François-Philippe Champagne, Liberal, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

If you will allow me, Mr. Davies, because I have not been privy to the specific contracts, as I'm sure you would understand, I can ask my deputy minister to provide you the details with respect to the terms of the contracts.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you, Minister.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

This is the time the ministers gave us, and I know that they gave us a little extra time so that we could get through the four parties for the third round. I want to thank them for being with us today and for answering the questions that many of us have had.

With that, I will allow the ministers to leave. We will continue our rounds with the deputy ministers and other representatives from the departments.

Ministers, again, thank you for your time. Thank your teams for us, on our behalf.

[François-Philippe Champagne, Liberal, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for welcoming us and for allowing us to provide details to the committee.

Thank you, everyone. Have a good day.

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you very much, everyone. Goodbye.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

MP Dreeshen, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I may want to share my time with Mr. Nader as well.

I have just a couple of comments.

We have just heard from the minister that as far as contracts are concerned, one of the two contracting parties could decide whether or not they want to have some of the details held in confidence, but are not some of the contracts that are being exposed by other countries with the same companies? If they are, then is it not Canada that is holding it up?

Also, of course, for these negotiations, if they are not identical, it would be interesting to know why it is that we've been suffering. Is this perhaps the reason why we don't want to show how difficult it is?

[Bill Matthews, Deputy Minister, Department of Public Works and Government Services]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

I think to maybe further elaborate on the comments Minister Anand made, it is a contract between two parties, and the differences you will have to keep in mind with other countries are that where there is manufacturing occurring in other countries, which the governments may or may not have been a party to in terms of financial investment or other pieces, that then draws a different discussion around potential disclosure.

We're certainly not in a world where we are interested in potentially being in breach of contract, especially given how important the product is, and it is a contract between two parties, as was already said. That's I think all I can offer on that front.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Okay.

To go to another point, we keep hearing about how we will have procurement possibilities for hundreds of millions of doses. Of course, we don't need hundreds of millions of doses, so what actually happens to the value of those doses that we have procured?

I mean, does this work into the price that you might have to pay if you're only getting maybe at the most 100 million doses but you're telling all of these suppliers that you could get as many as 400 million from them? If that is the case, for the difference between 100 million and 400 million, is this to pay back those that we're going to be taking from the COVAX fund?

[Bill Matthews]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a couple of comments.

When the contracts were put in place with the seven different manufacturers, again, this was during last summer, at a time when nobody was certain which vaccines would actually make it across the line. We have two that have made it through regulatory approval and, hopefully, more to come soon. That was the reason, and companies were taking risks to basically do research, clinical trials and start production at the same time, so there was a need to sort of pony up if you wanted your foot in the door early.

In terms of what happens if they all come to fruition and Canada gets more doses than we need, well, there's an ability to donate. As has already been mentioned, no one is really sure what the durability of these vaccines is. Is this an annual thing so that they could be folded into future years' vaccines as well? There's flexibility there, and I think, frankly, that it's just too early to say what will happen, given the various stages of regulatory approval.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

What is the capacity of Canada to be able to supply doses to those people who need them? I'm asking this because you say that there could be as many as two million a week and so on. I know that there are a lot of unique things that people are talking about as to the ways to get vaccines into people's arms. Does anybody know what the capacity is of the Canadian medical system to actually be able to get these doses into Canadians?

[Simon Kennedy]

Madam Chair, I'll be pretty brief here because we're drifting into Public Health Agency territory, but a key point here is that provinces and territories have a key role in the actual final mile to get vaccines into people's arms.

I think the two vaccines that are in play right now, Moderna and Pfizer, as I think all are aware, have fairly specialized shipping and storage requirements in terms of cold temperatures. Some of the other vaccine candidates do not have those rather rigid requirements, so it does open up a different list of possibilities in terms of how vaccines might be administered, but those are discussions that the Public Health Agency is having on an ongoing basis with provinces.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Certainly. My last question is going to be this. We seem to be lulling people into the idea that the end of September would be a great time to have all of this done. Why couldn't it be done by the end of June?

[Simon Kennedy]

I'll be very brief on this one. The end of September date is driven by the quarterly allocations of the two approved vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna. To the extent that additional vaccines are approved and deliveries occur, obviously that date can be put forward, but the end of September is based on two vaccines and quarterly allocations from those companies.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you so much.

Our next round of questions goes to MP Jowhari. You have the floor for five minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Once again, welcome to both deputy ministers.

Let me start with Mr. Kennedy. I just want to follow up on the question that you ran out of time to respond to from my colleague MP Erskine-Smith. You were talking about the various types of vaccines that are being developed. You were going to touch on the investment that we have made. Can you expand on that, please?

[Simon Kennedy]

Yes. I could just say, generally speaking, that if you look at the portfolio of international vaccine candidates that the government has purchased, there has been an effort to make sure there are a number of each of the main different types of vaccines. The ones that have been approved are using messenger RNA, but there are other vaccines that are protein-based. There are viral vector-based vaccines. There are different major platforms for vaccine production.

In the same fashion, when it comes to the efforts to boost Canada's biomanufacturing capacity, there has been a deliberate effort to make sure there are investments going to different kinds of platforms. For example, Minister Champagne mentioned the investment in Medicago. Medicago is a plant-based, virus-like particle vaccine. He mentioned the investment in VIDO-InterVac. That's a protein subunit vaccine. If I look at the investment in Provenance therapeutics, I see that's a messenger RNA vaccine.

The efforts on biomanufacturing and the support the government has given to the various Canadian vaccine candidates to advance their clinical trial work have been across these various kinds of technologies. The idea is not to put all of our eggs in one basket. It's to have multiple eggs and multiple baskets.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

In his opening remarks, Minister Champagne talked about the suitability for COVID-19 vaccine production. Even among those existing vaccine producers in Canada, he said the capacity is already allocated for some of the flu vaccine.

I have two questions. Number one, what would be considered suitable COVID-19 vaccine production? What qualifies, or what is unique about that? As part of either the vaccine task force or the Joint Biomanufacturing Subcommittee, did we explore working with those existing facilities to expand their capacity?

[Simon Kennedy]

Madam Chair, I'll try to give a brief answer. It's a very technical answer to give a full answer. I also don't want to pretend I'm a technical expert.

I would say that if we did a full survey of all of the assets in Canada.... As Minister Anand noted earlier, there were very active discussions to see whether we could get technology transfer to have some of these candidates produced in Canada. You need to match up the candidate you want to transfer with a facility that can handle it. It's a bit of a mix-and-match.

For example, certain vaccines actually have to be produced in a certain level of biosafety. You can't produce them next door to some other product. There are other vaccines where the biosafety level can be lower. If you take, for example, GSK in Ste-Foy, it has a facility that makes seasonal flu vaccines. That's an egg-based technology. The messenger RNA vaccines that are currently approved and being used are not able.... You don't produce messenger RNA using an egg-based technology. The challenge is that you have to have technology that's aligned to the vaccine.

Then the other thing Minister Champagne said—which frankly I think was really the more important and more salient point—is that the companies required scale to really make it interesting. I noted the honourable member Mr. Davies had asked, “Well, what about Korea? What about Mexico?” I just took a quick look at the capabilities in South Korea. South Korea has facilities that have bioreactors that actually can handle hundreds of thousands of litres of substance. In Canada, generally, in the facilities we were dealing with, we're talking about a few thousand litres, 5,000 litres, etc. There are [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Mr. Kennedy, we've lost your audio. I've paused the clock.

[Simon Kennedy]

I apologize.

Maybe I'll stop, because I don't want to take up too much time. It's just to say, Madam Chair, that the international facilities we're generally partnering with—like AstraZeneca and others—were able to produce, by an order of magnitude, far more than any facility in Canada could produce.

The challenge for the companies is that technology transfer is a time-consuming effort. It isn't like getting a muffin recipe and you get the ingredients and you make it. Typically, it's six months or longer. You have to do small lots of the vaccine and prove you can do it. The technicians from the company have to be on site to check everything. When these companies were allocating effort, they had to focus on facilities that could produce massive amounts, not smaller-scale facilities that could produce a smaller amount.

Thank you.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you. That was great.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you so much.

Because we have a few minutes left, we're going start round four. I'll give each party a slot to ask some questions.

We will start with MP Nater. You have the floor for five minutes.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'll start with Mr. Matthews, from procurement.

Mr. Matthews, Minister Anand mentioned that she read the entirety of the Pfizer and Moderna contracts. Have you also read these contracts?