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.