Industry Committee on Feb. 16th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Good morning, everyone. I now call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 17 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of January 25, 2021. The proceedings will be available via the House of Commons website, and the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entirety of the committee.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I'd like to outline a few rules to follow. Members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor, English or French audio. For members participating in person, proceed as you usually would when the whole committee is meeting in person in the committee room. Keep in mind the directives from the Board of Internal Economy regarding masking and health protocols.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on video conference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. If you are in the room, your microphone will be controlled as normal by the proceedings and verification officer. I'll just give a reminder to all that comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair. When you are not speaking, I ask that you keep your microphone off.

With regard to the speaking list, the committee clerk and I will do our best to maintain the order of speaking for all members, whether you are participating virtually or in person.

If you are joining us for the first time, as is my normal practice, I will hold up a yellow card when you have 30 seconds remaining in your intervention and a red card when your time for questions has expired. As we have a very full agenda today, I ask that you respect those timelines so that every member has a chance to have their questions asked.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Tuesday, December 1, 2020, the committee is meeting today to continue its study on the domestic manufacturing capacity for a COVID-19 vaccine. I'd now like to welcome our witnesses.

Today, from Providence Therapeutics, we have Ken Hughes, chair of the board, and Brad Sorenson, chief executive officer. From VIDO-InterVac, we have Volker Gerdts, director and chief executive officer. From BIOTECanada, we have Andrew Casey, president and CEO. As individuals, we have Professor Amir Attaran from the University of Ottawa; Professor Joel Lexchin from the University of Toronto's department of family and community medicine, emergency medicine division; and Professor Alain Lamarre.

Each witness will present for five minutes, followed by rounds of questions. With that, I will start with Providence Therapeutics.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Ken Hughes, Chair of the Board, Providence Therapeutics]

Thank you, Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to join you today.

As the former chair of the aboriginal affairs committee of the House of Commons, I acknowledge with respect that we live on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples from sea to sea to sea.

My name is Ken Hughes, and I have served as chair of the board of Providence Therapeutics for about four years. As a country, we are not yet where we want to be in protecting Canadians from this pandemic, yet Canada has exceptional public and private sector scientific, medical and business expertise—among the very best in the world. Unfortunately, we have not marshalled that capacity effectively. Never again should we have to rely upon other countries for vaccines or the science behind them.

Providence can have millions of doses of messenger RNA vaccine by this fall, the goal being October. We're on that path now, having recruited leading development and manufacturing expertise.

Last summer, decisions were made to buy large orders of vaccines from outside of Canada. The received wisdom was that we did not have the capacity to do it in Canada. Unfortunately, at that time, people focused only on the supply of vaccines for Canada for the pandemic as we all knew it then. There was little focus on how we prepare ourselves for a world beyond the immediate pandemic. Let's not make that mistake again.

Things have changed. First, emerging variants may enable the coronavirus to stay with us for the foreseeable future. Second, messenger RNA has been validated as an agile, highly effective and responsive vaccine platform. There are other Canadian vaccine teams that can contribute as well. Canadians can develop vaccines and manufacture them here. We can even blunt emerging variants of the virus. We can do it, but we won't do it just by inviting in branch plants of foreign companies. We do it by building up the domestic talent we have here already.

As America's closest neighbour, we have learned never to bet against America when they put their minds to something. They put their minds and billions of dollars behind Operation Warp Speed and, among other things, validated the messenger RNA platform for vaccines.

In the future, I would like the world to look at Canada and say, “You know, those Canadians—never bet against them.” That could be our future. We are here today specifically to ask the Canadian government to invest in Canadian capacity and help realize that future.

Thank you. I am pleased to turn it over to Brad Sorenson, CEO and founder of Providence Therapeutics.

[Brad Sorenson, Chief Executive Officer, Providence Therapeutics]

Messenger RNA is the most effective vaccine technology on the planet. In the worldwide race for a COVID vaccine, messenger RNA was the fastest by months, and it was the most effective, at 95% efficacy. It will be the fastest to respond to the variants that are emerging now. It is the most scalable vaccine technology, having gone from novel technology to rolling out hundreds of millions of doses within six months.

The committee will recall that prior to November 2020, no mRNA drug, vaccine or otherwise had ever been approved for use in humans. In fact, prior to 2020, Moderna and BioNTech, the inventor of the Pfizer vaccine, had never even run a phase three trial, yet these untested and unproven companies are now Canada's lifeline to safety and economic stability.

In 2020, Providence designed a vaccine in under four weeks. We negotiated and paid for a licence to the necessary intellectual property, established productive collaborations with other companies across Canada and completed over five preclinical animal trials to establish the safety and efficacy of our vaccine. We qualified a “good manufacturing practices”—or GMP—manufacturing process and manufactured enough vaccine to complete all of our clinical trials. We prepared a successful clinical trial application, and we were given the green light, known as “authorization”, by Health Canada to proceed in phase one trials.

In 2021, Providence will manufacture and sell vaccines directly to Canada's provinces. It will build out manufacturing capacity covering the entire value chain of messenger RNA vaccine production, from the earliest raw material to the final formulation and fill finish. It will complete the clinical trial process with Health Canada and secure all the necessary approvals to enable the provinces to administer those vaccines to Canadians. Providence will accelerate its work on booster doses for variants and bring its second-generation vaccine, using both B- and T-cell mediated immune protection, into the clinic.

In short, Providence will do all that is necessary to ensure Canadians have the earliest access to the best vaccines.

I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

Our next witness is Mr. Gerdts.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Dr. Volker Gerdts, Director and Chief Executive Officer, VIDO-InterVac]

Good morning, Madam Chair.

Good morning, members of the committee. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you this morning.

My name is Volker Gerdts. I'm the director and CEO of VIDO, the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization here at the University of Saskatchewan.

For those of you who may not be familiar with us, we are a research centre here at the university, and during this response to the pandemic we really have become one of Canada's go-to places for COVID-19 research. We were the first in the country to isolate the virus, the first in the country to establish an animal model that has been used to test vaccines and antivirals and so on, and since the beginning of last year, we have worked with more than 80 companies, half of them Canadian, on identifying vaccine therapeutics and antivirals.

We also have our own vaccine in the making. We were also able to design this vaccine and have it in the lab, produced and ready for immunization, within four weeks. We were one of the first in the world to have this vaccine in animals, and over the last year, similar to what you just heard, we also completed the necessary animal trials to get approval from Health Canada. Our vaccine is now also in phase one trials.

Our vaccine is a protein subunit vaccine, which is a well-known technology that has been in humans for many years. It offers many advantages in that it's more stable, easier to store and easier to transport. The adjuvant we're mixing with it gives a very broad immune response, which is great for these variants.

What we are also doing here at VIDO right now is building a manufacturing facility. This manufacturing facility is currently under way. It's a 10,000-square foot facility. It's called a pilot-scale manufacturing facility, and it will enable us to produce both human and animal vaccines here at VIDO-InterVac. It is also unique in that it is tied into the biocontainment facility that we operate here at VIDO, Canada's largest high-containment laboratory, and thus, will enable us to work on vaccines for emerging diseases as they emerge.

Construction is currently under way. By October this facility will be completed, and then there will be a phase of GMP certification, commissioning of the facility and so on. By next year our facility will be ready to produce vaccines here in Canada.

We also have put forward a proposal to the federal government with support from the provincial government as well as, hopefully, from private donors and the municipal government, for VIDO really to become Canada's centre for pandemic research. We have currently the largest infrastructure for high containment research right here in Saskatoon, which is based on previous investments by governments. That includes Canada's largest high-containment laboratory, the International Vaccine Centre.

We are now building an in-house GMP manufacturing facility. What we think is needed to really become one of those centres that can help the country in better preparing for the next emerging disease is having an animal facility that allows us to work with a wide range of animals including bats, insects, ticks, reptiles and so on. That's a proposal we put forward, but if we as a country want to be self-reliant and self-sufficient in terms of domestic manufacturing and research capacity, we think it is necessary to have these national centres that are specifically focused on emerging diseases.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

We now turn to Mr. Casey.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Andrew Casey, President and Chief Executive Officer, BIOTECanada]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much for this important, and obviously, very timely opportunity to provide some perspectives from BIOTECanada.

By way of introduction, BIOTECanada is the national association representing Canada's biotech sector. Our members are 240-plus. They are across the country in every single city and province. They include all the small, early-stage companies that are developing new solutions for the world. You've heard about some of them during the COVID crisis. They include AbCellera, Precision NanoSystems, Medicago and VIDO-InterVac. They are all emerging technologies.

Our membership also includes the large multinational pharmaceutical companies that are developing the vaccines, so the big brand names that everybody has become familiar with over the past several months. Both of those groups come together and present the BIOTECanada voice. What we talk about is a world that's moving to 10 billion people and the types of solutions that biotechnology represents in getting us out of some of the problems and challenges that we face as a global society.

The COVID crisis has greatly underlined just how critical these types of solutions are going to be for society, obviously now, and then going forward. If you think back to just a little over a year ago, when the first case was diagnosed in Canada, it was hard to imagine then that we would be where we are right now. It was very difficult to foresee where this was going to go.

We now have the benefit of some hindsight and some opportunity to plan going forward. The government did some very strategically smart things in terms of looking at the technologies that were out there, investing in some of the Canadian technologies and trying to advance them a bit more quickly than they would have normally advanced, as Volker just enunciated, but also looking out and seeing which of the vaccine technologies showed the greatest promise for delivering solutions in the immediate future.

We now sit in a situation where vaccines are going into the arms of Canadians. More vaccines are going to come online. It's an important time to take some stock and learn some lessons. We've been through this before in other crises, like SARS. There were warning signs. We were all told we should prepare for a pandemic. We now have to prepare for a COVID-30. Pick your year, pick your virus, but there's going to be another challenge like this. What are we going to do to prepare for that, so we're not back in a situation where we're cobbling together a solution?

Canada has an enormous opportunity to build on its biotech ecosystem and the solutions that are coming out of the industry, but also the international players that are present in this country. They are a big part of the solution as well in terms of partners and investors in this country.

A strategy that would bring all that together, build on the collaboration that existed to this day, would be a wise thing to do, and certainly, as we think about going forward, it's something we should plan for.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

We now go to Professor Attaran, for five minutes.

[Professor Amir Attaran, Professor, Faculty of Law and School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I'm Professor Amir Attaran. By way of background, I'm a scientist. My Ph.D. is in cell biology and immunology from Oxford. I'm a lawyer. I've worked in the pharmaceutical industry, including on a project where we had to increase production 6,000% in one year, so I feel the pain of those in industry who have to step up to this right now.

I want to talk about what has brought us to this point. I'm going to list eight things.

The first is that Canada was slow when competition for vaccine purchases and partnerships was intense last spring and summer. We were weeks or months slower off the mark than peer countries. Who has ever heard of the last-mover advantage? It doesn't exist.

The second point is that we did not manufacture the only vaccine that we could have done, which is the Oxford-AstraZeneca one, and which was available to us and other countries under a licence. Since that time, the Prime Minister has oddly blamed this on Brian Mulroney. That isn't really true, because a careful study shows that Britain itself did not have as much vaccine manufacturing capacity at the beginning of 2020 as Canada did. Canada had more.

They stepped on it. They built capacity in months. They are now nearly the best in the world at vaccination. We are around 40th place, and that's a big problem. Every day, the British vaccinate a huge number of people that we don't. The Americans vaccinate more people every day than Canada has in the last two months combined.

Third, compared with those countries, our vaccine task force is shockingly secretive. As late as July last year the government would not even release the names of the participants on the vaccine task force, much less the work plan, much less the minutes of their meetings, which are still secret. We now see the result of that. Unfortunately, the co-chair, Dr. Joanne Langley is now embarking on a media tour to rewrite history and say that the task force did a good job. It patently didn't, given where we are today.

Fourth, our government put the wrong ministry in charge. Every single successful country at this—the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Chile—put the health ministry in the lead, but in Canada, vaccines have been led by the industry ministry and procurement, as if we are building a bridge or procuring toilet paper, which is not the case. The health ministry in Canada is conspicuous in its absence.

Fifth, when all this was realized, Anita Anand, apparently with PMO approval, ran around in agitated anguish trying to sign any vaccine deal she could. We've signed more than any other country in the world, yet some of the deals we've signed are with companies that can't deliver in 2021. Some of them won't be able to deliver in 2022. Some of them, and we've heard from one this morning, perhaps will never deliver. It seems that in panic what we did was become less strategic rather than more.

Sixth, much of this institutional failure I've outlined is because Canada's science establishment—and I underscore this—is plain inferior to our peer countries. We have no Tony Fauci, not even close. On the contrary, the Prime Minister's chief science adviser, Dr. Mona Nemer, has issued three statements, precisely three, since coming into the office years ago. Two of the three are on election financing and Canada Day. That's not science. She has, with the help of outside committees during COVID, issued three fairly low-quality reports on COVID science. In contrast, little Switzerland has issued over 70 reports from its COVID task force.

Seventh, these indications of disaster were just not heeded. Journalists have been writing about this for a long time. I wrote a desperate warning last August in Maclean's that we were heading for vaccine failure and I was quite ignored, as were the journalists' warnings. I even personally wrote to the Prime Minister's Office in August. There was no dialogue set up with that until November, so we have an insular government as well that is hurting us here.

Here is my final point. Even today, I'm not confident that good ideas are being heard, and that's critical to our security and I'll explain why in questions.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much, Professor Attaran.

We now go to Professor Lexchin. You have the floor for five minutes.

[Dr. Joel Lexchin, Associate Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Emergency Medicine Division, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thanks to the committee for inviting me to speak.

My name is Joel Lexchin. I'm an emergency physician in downtown Toronto. I've been one for the past 39 years, and I taught health policy for 15 years at York University.

A lot of the points that I'm going to make have been made in one form or another already, so I'll just emphasize a few.

One of them is that when we came into the COVID pandemic, we lacked any manufacturing capability. This was partly because of the sale of Connaught to Mérieux, which is now part of Sanofi, in the late 1980s, and then the sale of Biochem Pharma in 2006, which was based in Quebec, to GlaxoSmithKline. While Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline continue to make vaccines here in Canada, they have decided not to make the COVID vaccine that they are jointly working on in Canada. Although they have plants here, they are not going to utilize them to make the vaccine if and when it gets approved.

We also had warnings about the need for a vaccine policy and domestic vaccine manufacturing. This came about through SARS in 2003. After SARS, David Naylor wrote a report emphasizing the need for a vaccine strategy and for a secure supply of vaccines. We seemed to ignore that. We had the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. The vaccine production in the plant in Sainte-Foy was delayed. We seemed to ignore that. Then we had ebola in 2014. Fortunately it didn't arrive in Canada, but we ignored that too.

We come to early 2020. We've ignored warnings, and we don't have any domestic capability to make a COVID vaccine. As a result, we ended up relying on a number of foreign-based companies manufacturing vaccines outside Canada, and we've seen currently what the results of that have been with Pfizer's delays and Moderna's delays.

In view of that, I offer four recommendations to the committee.

The first one is that we need to develop a national vaccine strategy that will consist of a strong and enduring financial commitment to publicly funded and publicly run vaccine research. As I said, this has been recommended before and largely ignored.

Secondly, we need to invest in a domestic, publicly owned vaccine manufacturing facility so that we can avoid the situation of a privately owned Canadian company being sold to foreign interests at some time in the future and, therefore, removing control from Canadian hands. That's what we have with the situation with Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline: manufacturing facilities based in Canada, decisions made outside Canada, and the decision not to manufacture their vaccine here in this country.

Thirdly, if we can't guarantee domestic vaccine production, Canada should issue compulsory licences to increase vaccine production.

Finally, in the future, if we're going to grant money for vaccine research and manufacturing to private companies or sign contracts for vaccines with private companies, we need to make those deals publicly known with the details so that we can understand what's happening and what's not happening in the country.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much, Professor.

Mr. Lamarre, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Alain Lamarre, Full professor, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

First of all, I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to participate in this meeting. I believe this is a topic of paramount importance to national security and to dealing with this pandemic, but more importantly to better prepare us for possible future pandemics.

It's also a topic that concerns me personally, having been involved at all levels in the vaccine development chain during my career, from vaccine design to clinical trials.

I'm a professor at the Armand-Frappier Santé Biotechnologie Research Centre of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, on the campus of the former Institut Armand-Frappier.

Dr. Armand Frappier was a pioneer in public health in Quebec and Canada. He participated in the development and manufacturing of numerous vaccines. At that time, Canada was a world leader in vaccine production, but its production capacity gradually eroded with the globalization of this industry. Canada's small share of the international market certainly also contributed to the exodus of vaccine manufacturers as early as the 1980s.

As a result, we are now faced with a national vaccine production capacity that is insufficient for our needs and that leaves us at the mercy of vaccine “protectionism”, as we see it at work today. Canada has begun to make substantial investments to restore its domestic vaccine production capacity, but an even greater effort should be made in the coming years to rebuild a rich and diverse ecosystem at all levels of the vaccine development chain.

In order to contribute to thinking about these strategic issues, I would like to propose three areas where Canada will need to consolidate its investments to maximize the potential benefits of vaccine production.

First, federal investments in basic research in Canada must be continued and increased. Basic research is an indispensable component in the development of new technologies related to immunization. For example, the messenger RNA technology, which is the basis of the new Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, is the result of developments in the design of new approaches to cancer treatment. This means that the development of innovative approaches does not always require targeted, problem-specific investments, but often emanates from overall investments in basic research, the potential benefits of which were often unsuspected at the outset.

While the government's allocation of funds to the federal granting agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, or CIHR, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, or NSERC, has increased over the years, the growing number of applicants and the rising costs of research have meant that the success rate for research grants has declined significantly in recent years, putting at risk the operation of many university laboratories. It will therefore be important to increase research grants to maintain our place on the world stage.

Second, continued and increased federal investment in leading-edge research infrastructure through the Canada Foundation for Innovation. New advances in basic research, particularly in vaccine development, require state-of-the-art infrastructure. The creation of the Canada Foundation for Innovation has placed Canada in an enviable position in this regard relative to some other countries. However, this new infrastructure entails significant operating and maintenance costs for researchers and universities. Continued and increased investment in infrastructure, as well as funding for its long-term operation and maintenance costs, will be critical in the coming years to maximize the benefits of these investments.

Finally, a funding structure needs to be put in place at the interface between academic research and the pharmaceutical industry for vaccine development. Canada has several world leaders in vaccine development in its universities. These researchers are designing and developing new, innovative and diverse vaccine approaches. However, the costs associated with vaccine development are often too great for universities or small biotechnology companies to carry out. As a result, many candidate vaccines developed in universities never reach the market.

Government investment in the commercialization of innovations emerging in universities could help advance the industrial and clinical development of promising vaccine candidates until they are sufficiently advanced and mature to attract the interest of large pharmaceutical companies and invest heavily in their large-scale production and distribution.

The presence of these vaccine development accelerators in Canada could also encourage these same pharmaceutical companies to build vaccine production facilities nearby and therefore complete the vaccine production chain. As a professor at the INRS, I would be the first to want to participate in the operation of this type of accelerator with my students.

In conclusion, it isn't too late for Canada to better position itself in vaccine production so that it will be better prepared to fight COVID-19 and other pandemics in the future.

Thank you. I am available to answer any questions you may have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you, Professor Lamarre.

We'll now go with our round of questions.

Our first round of questions goes to Monsieur Paul-Hus.

You have six minutes.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for their testimony today.

Day by day, week by week, we're learning just how incompetent the federal government is and how much it has improvised.

My first question is for Mr. Sorenson of Providence Therapeutics.

A leading scientist, Dr. Gary Kobinger of the Infectious Diseases Research Center of Laval University, who is also a departing member of the COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, said out loud what the scientific community is thinking, that federal support for science-based companies like yours has been lacking.

Could you tell us about the impact of the government's failure to manage the situation from the beginning?

[Ken Hughes]

Madam Chair, I will start.

I would not say this is the failing of one government. This is the failing of Canada and our ability to focus and develop strategic capacity over many governments. It's easy to point fingers, but as kids we all learned that when you point a finger, you have three fingers pointing right back at you.

We all know it doesn't take us anywhere to worry about how we got here. We got here because people were not completely informed. We got here because of mistakes in judgment. However, in my experience people in public life have good intent and try to do their very best with the information they have.

If we look back at how we got here over the last several decades, we haven't invested enough. We haven't used our strategic capacity to figure out what we really need and don't need in preparing for a crisis like the one we have. This was not a complete surprise. People like Bill Gates made it quite clear, if people had been listening.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Sorenson, Gary Kobinger mentioned that Minister Anand's remarks insulted him. She told the Journal de Montréal that “to set up a new vaccine plant, you need expertise, you need to be able to get resources from suppliers”. He said it was an insult that the minister would say that we don't have the expertise in Canada to produce vaccines.

What do you think about that?

[Brad Sorenson]

If the question is whether we have the production to make all the different vaccine technologies that are being pursued across the entire platform, the answer is no. We don't. We have production in Canada that's committed to other essential vaccines that still need to be produced. COVID isn't the only problem across the world.

My only complaint isn't necessarily with the work of the task force or the government in casting a very broad net early on. My frustration is that as data rolled in and as we saw technologies that were effective, I didn't see any adaptation to that additional knowledge.

Again, I agree with my colleague, Ken Hughes, that it's not about pointing fingers. No government had the experience of dealing with a pandemic prior to this, but the question is what we are going to do with the information that we have now and how we are going to apply that information on a going-forward basis.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Sorenson.

This leads me to my next question, which is for Prof. Attaran.

I have an example of the disconnection of ministers or cabinet staff. I have here an exchange of e-mails between Minister Anita Anand and Honeywell. As early as the beginning of March 2020, Honeywell mentioned having the capacity to supply the N95 masks. E-mails from political staff indicated that they weren't needed and that it wasn't necessary.

Do you think that this problem in assessing the situation was generalized from the beginning? Were staff and ministers lacking in skills or information? Did a lack of information lead them to make poor decisions, such as those we're seeing today? For example, the government decided to do business with CanSino Biologics Inc. when it was clear that it wasn't the best idea to negotiate with the Chinese communist regime, and to reject companies like Honeywell and others out of hand.

Prof. Attaran, do you have something to tell me briefly about this?

[Prof. Amir Attaran]

That's a good question.

In reality, the problem is that the Canadian government lacks scientific expertise. Our federal institutions aren't as aware of the importance of this expertise as those in other countries, including the United States and England.

The problem is simply scientific illiteracy.

I am trained in the United States. I did my graduate work in the United Kingdom. I worked in Europe at a pharmaceutical firm and then I came to Canada. I love Canada. It's where I've chosen to raise a family. However, it is simply the least scientifically competent country I've ever come across.

That is a much larger discussion—perhaps not for today, but it is one on which our lives depend. Why are we, as a government, so institutionally weak on science?

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

Our next round of questions goes to MP Ehsassi. You have the floor for six minutes.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to all the witnesses for appearing before committee.

As you know, Mr. Casey, since our early days of COVID-19, the government was focused on a three-pronged approach. First was to try to secure leading international vaccines. Second was to invest in the most promising Canadian manufacturers of therapeutics and vaccines. Third was to develop biomanufacturing capacity. Central to that strategy was the establishment of a vaccine task force.

Could you share with us your opinion of the vaccine task force? After all, leading scientists and industry experts sit on that committee. They've been doing their due diligence. Could you tell us whether that was an effective approach or not?

[Andrew Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Ehsassi, for the question.

I do. I actually think it was a very strong approach. The government recognized early on that this was going to be a very fast moving space and that it did not have the expertise and the depth to quickly identify where the really promising technologies were going to be. It understood very well that it had to move quickly.

If I look at that task force both for the vaccines and also for the therapeutics.... If you recall back in the early days, some of the main thinking was that therapeutics were going to be the first things that would help us and the vaccines would come later—maybe three to five years later. Therapeutics were actually one of the first steps they moved into.

On both, they put together panels of experts that spread across a fairly wide and diverse areas of expertise. I think that was the prudent thing to do. You get not only expertise from a number of different key communities, but you also get the connections that a lot of those individuals bring to the table, particularly when you're dealing in a global context. It's the ability to reach out to other parts of the world and to other companies to connect and understand where things are moving and where the puck is going. I think that was absolutely critical.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

They had to review data from over 300 vaccine manufacturers and they ultimately settled on seven as perhaps being the most promising. How do you think they did with respect to the seven that were identified as companies that Canada should attempt to enter into contracts with? Was that a good bet?