Industry Committee on Feb. 16th, 2021

[Andrew Casey]

It sure seems to be.

Look at how many potential candidates were out there and the new types of technologies. I understand that the contracts we signed are with the seven that showed the greatest promise, not the least of which are the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Coming shortly thereafter is going to be the AstraZeneca vaccine and Novavax. Those were all identified by the group. I think figuring that part out was absolutely critical.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you.

Now I will go to Mr. Lexchin.

You obviously come at this with many years of experience. You touched upon how there was an exodus of vaccine manufacturers from Canada, starting in 2007, which was AstraZeneca, then in 2010 Johnson & Johnson, in 2011 Teva, and in 2013 Boehringer. It's also important to bear in mind that the previous government did not understand the significance of investing in life sciences.

How critical were these developments in terms of hollowing out our capacity to develop vaccines here at home in Canada?

[Dr. Joel Lexchin]

I don't think it was just the Conservative government that is to blame for this. When the Chrétien government came into power, I think in 1993, it did not engage in any investment. The government seemed to ignore the recommendations of the Naylor report, which was commissioned in 2003 after SARS. In fact, Harper didn't do anything and neither did Trudeau. In fact, they let the PHAC early warning system deteriorate such that we were taken, more or less, by surprise by the pandemic.

I don't think we can blame this on any one government. I think it's been a failure to look at things in a future sense and take action.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Excellent. Thank you.

I will follow up with the same question I asked Mr. Casey. If you could provide your insights with respect to the vaccine task force, and how crucial and critical it has been to our overall effort as a country, how would you rate it?

[Dr. Joel Lexchin]

There are a number of problems with the vaccine task force. As Professor Attaran pointed out, the names of the people were kept secret. The conflicts of interest were kept secret. The advice they've given to the government has been kept secret. There aren't any minutes of the meetings, so we don't know if the advice that they were giving was influenced by the conflicts of interest on the committee.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Unfortunately, that's all your time, MP Ehsassi.

Mr. Lemire, you have six minutes.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for their presentations.

Mr. Lamarre, you mentioned several things in your speech. I'd like to follow up on certain elements.

What concrete measures need to be taken within our pharmaceutical ecosystem, from basic research to bio-manufacturing, so that Quebec and Canada have the necessary means to ensure the success of their investments?

[Alain Lamarre]

Thank you for your question, Mr. Lemire.

Indeed, we heard today from other stakeholders that Canada's entire ecosystem is in bad shape and lacking. Massive reinvestment is needed at all levels of vaccine development. It starts at the grassroots, at the basic research level. This would ensure that new technologies can always emerge and be supported in their maturation towards eventual commercialization.

We also need to solidify our technology and infrastructure capacity. In addition, we need to develop clinical trials or good manufacturing practices to ensure that our technologies that are developed in universities can mature into biotechnologies that will be commercialized.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

In your opening remarks, you mentioned that the Government of Canada needs to make investments to maximize the potential benefits of vaccine production.

What are the benefits of these investments?

[Alain Lamarre]

This would put us in a situation that would be much more comfortable than the one we're in right now. Indeed, we are at the mercy of foreign partners who can decide overnight to favour their population over exports.

This would give us greater autonomy and more domestic production capacity. It would allow us to keep our researchers at home, to prevent the exodus of our best researchers to foreign countries. It would also allow us to create new jobs here in Canada. So there are many benefits to this strategy.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Currently, there are delays in the supply of vaccines in Canada. Having missed the boat for the past 20 years and more, according to Mr. Lexchin, has meant that the pharmaceutical industry hasn't been up to date and hasn't been able to meet the demand for mass vaccination against COVID-19. We are dependent on other countries. This is what I understand from your intervention.

[Alain Lamarre]

That's basically it.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

When Minister Champagne appeared before this committee, he talked about rebuilding the biomanufacturing base. We want to invest in research, and that's new, but what are the pitfalls to avoid?

[Alain Lamarre]

We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket and bet on a single technology or particular manufacturer.

The vaccine manufacturing industry needs to be as diverse as possible with all kinds of technologies. The technology that's prevailing today may be quite different 10 years from now. We need to have a slightly more global picture and invest massively at different levels to be ready and flexible for future pandemics.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

The pharmaceutical industry was a flagship, particularly in Quebec and Canada, until the 2000s, when the Liberal government under Paul Martin suspended Technology Partnerships Canada on risk sharing. Another program was also abolished by Mr. Harper's Conservative government.

Should the government invest in similar programs to provide confidence and predictability to the pharmaceutical industry?

[Alain Lamarre]

This is one possibility among others in terms of incentives.

What is most important to the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to choosing one country over another is the research ecosystem, in other words, equipment, ideas and people. Canada needs to invest heavily in all of these aspects to rebuild that ecosystem and eventually attract pharmaceutical giants to settle here permanently.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

The ecosystem also includes infrastructures. Could you explain in detail the importance of investing in infrastructure for the development of new technologies and clinical trials?

[Alain Lamarre]

Vaccine development is a special industry. I could include all biological products in this category. It's already very expensive to market or scale up technologies using good manufacturing practices. You also have to get enough products to be able to conduct clinical trials, which are also very expensive. Facilities are needed for immunomonitoring vaccines. All of these things take a lot of money, and Canada will need to invest in all of these areas.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lamarre.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

Our next round of questions goes to MP Masse.

You have the floor for six minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, witnesses.

Mr. Lexchin, my first question will be for you. I come from a manufacturing base in Windsor, Ontario, and we remember during the election when Prime Minister Trudeau said that we needed a transition out of manufacturing. We had a collective gasp down here, because we've been fighting for our auto industry. Meanwhile across the river in Detroit, they've put $16 billion into auto in the “platinum age” as I call it, with new electrification and so forth. We are slowly catching up, with only a few billion dollars across our entire country.

Our tool and die mould-making industry almost went bankrupt, but we transitioned into aerospace from auto, and we keep auto and also medical devices.

My question specifically to you is this. Do you think there is still capacity in our country to build a manufacturing facility, as you have advocated for? I see it plain and simple down here that we can still do this. We switched to PPE at Ford and Hiram Walker distillery switched as well, but we have to have the political will to do so.

[Dr. Joel Lexchin]

Thanks very much for the question.

I think there is a capacity in Canada to build a publicly owned manufacturing facility. As people have pointed out, there are multiple different technologies to make vaccines. I don't think we can invest in all of them. That's why I think we also need to invest heavily into research and development in vaccine technology and more broadly in medical technology, so that we can look into the future, see what the emerging techniques are for making vaccines and, if necessary, use that to change the production capabilities of any publicly owned plant.

Right now in Canada, CIHR invests about a billion dollars a year in medical research. Compare that to what happens in the United States. It has ten times the population, but the NIH invests $40 billion, so that's four times as much per capita as Canada does. I think we need to go a long way to correct that imbalance.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Attaran, I want to come to your testimony with regard to Britain and what they did.

There seems to be somewhat of a disconnect—and it's an unfortunate one—with our scientific community. It seems that we don't have the bridge necessary or the confidence in the structural components of the scientific community to move it towards manufacturing. Perhaps you can reflect on what they did differently and better there, because they also had a decline in manufacturing, but they've reclimbed that ladder.

[Prof. Amir Attaran]

It proves that Canada could have done it last year and Canada failed.

I'll just quote from a report by the British biotech industry advocates, similar to BIOTECanada. Mr. Casey will know that Britain has an organization very similar to his.

Last year, they wrote that “the UK has limited or no vaccine manufacturing capability”. What did they mean by that?

They meant that the U.K. had only the capacity of 200 litres of cell culture growth capacity to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Two hundred litres isn't a lot, but at the end of 2019, the National Research Council had 500 litres capacity. We had more capacity in this country going into COVID than the British did, yet the British stepped up. They made use of their limited capacity in 2020. They really expanded it quickly.

That's what their vaccine task force did that ours failed to do, and now look where they are. They're manufacturing, and soon they'll be exporting. That was done in one year, and it was able to be done because there are single-use bioreactor technologies around the world that Canada just hasn't adopted. We blew it—and our vaccine task force blew it—in not doing that.

I want to add one last thing to this answer. At the end of 2019, when COVID hit, there was only one facility in the world that had ever made an adenovirus-based vaccine and commercialized it. That's the technology used by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. That laboratory was Canada's NRC. We were the only ones in the world to ever commercialize that vaccine. We got there first, yet that capacity was unused in 2020, and today it's still unused.