Industry Committee on April 8th, 2022

[Dr. Marc Sauer]

Of course. Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Michael Kram]

Thank you, Dr. Sauer and Mr. Fillmore.

Our next questioner is Monsieur Lemire from the Bloc Québécois.

Monsieur Lemire, you have six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Dr. Lamarre, I'm very pleased that you are here before the committee. As I mentioned when I was inviting you, you have been a remarkable witness for this committee. What I have learned from your point of view is the idea of funding throughout the vaccine and drug development chain, which needs to provide long-term funding for all the stakeholders in all the sectors, from research to sales, to rebuild a rich, innovative, collaborative, flexible, and diversified ecosystem. You spoke about this briefly earlier.

Since the last time you appeared before this committee a year ago, do you find that the progress made by governments, and the Canadian government in particular, is satisfactory?

[Dr. Alain Lamarre]

As I said in my presentation, there were major investments, and some of my colleagues here before the committee spoke about their results. There were the projects I mentioned and several others in development. There was recently an announcement about a new cell and gene therapy manufacturing facility in Hamilton. There is also the SmokePond Biologics project here in Laval, about which we are very enthusiastic.

So things are moving in Canada. There have been significant federal government investments, and that's good. This comes later in the vaccine production chain, but I think that the early stages, meaning the innovation and basic research generation process that is being carried out in Canadian research institutes and universities, ought not to be ignored. This research depends almost entirely on federal government research funding, whether through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the CIHR, or the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, NSERC. There is still a lot of work to be done because the budgets of funding research agencies like CIHR and NSERC have not grown very much in recent years, particularly given the growing numbers of researchers in Canada and the constantly-rising costs of research.

Just as the cost of living is increasing, the costs of infrastructure and staff are also rising. So if the CIHR has a budget of $1 billion a year, and it doesn't increase very much from one year to the next, the end result is a much lower success rate year-over-year in CIHR and NSERC competitions. As a result, potential innovations from Canadian universities are not adequately funded.

What I'd like to see in terms of government funding is a 10% per year increase over 10 years in the budgets of the three federal councils, to bring Canada's position closer to the leaders in the field, like the G7 countries, the United States and Europe. There's still a lot of work to do.

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

You probably heard, as I did, particularly during the first hour, all kinds of numbers about the amount of money that the department is going to provide to rebuild the Canadian vaccine and biological products production industry. For the first phase, $900 million is the figure that was mentioned, and $1.3 billion for the second phase, for a total of $2.2 billion. So far, only $1.6 billion have been spent, leaving $600 million unspent.

How can this money be invested in the short term to make conditions attractive once again for the pharmaceutical industry?

[Dr. Alain Lamarre]

I think, in fact, that what's needed is to create structures, along the lines of what the National Research Council of Canada has done, that are at the junction of university research and the pharmaceutical industry. That would make them independent of the ups and downs of the marketplace, to which the pharmaceutical and contract research companies are subject. These structures would also be publicly funded, with a view to developing technologies based on discoveries at universities or research institutes and moving them to an initial clinical study phase with human subjects.

For the federal government, it would be money well spent.

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

We hope so, because the message that was sent yesterday was rather weak. There was talk of $20 million over five years, beginning in 2021‑22, to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The message is not as forceful as the one that was sent last year.

What signal is that sending?

To finish up, I'll ask whether you are worried about any shortages in the supply chain?

[Dr. Alain Lamarre]

As I mentioned earlier, I am worried about that. The success rate in CIHR competitions, for example, is declining. It's below 20% in each competition, meaning that excellent research proposals are not being funded. Furthermore, even when a project is funded, 26% to 27% of the research budget is generally cut from each grant, because there is less money to hire staff.

As several speakers mentioned beforehand, it's important to invest funds not only on infrastructure, but also on highly qualified staff and graduate students, or even postdoctoral fellows. It's important to have significant budgets that can provide grants for educational and research internships, to ensure that Canada has a high-level scientific community available for recruitment in the biomanufacturing and vaccine manufacturing industries.

That troubles me even more than the supply chains. The latter are of course a concern, but I think that matter will be sorted out. We nevertheless need to continue to develop our qualified workers so that they can work in these industries over the coming years.

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

Thank you sincerely, Dr. Lamarre.

[Dr. Alain Lamarre]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Michael Kram]

Thank you, Dr. Lamarre and Monsieur Lemire.

Finally, from the NDP, we have Ms. Zarrillo for six minutes.

Ms. Zarrillo, the floor is yours.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll start with a question for Mr. Fulton, and if I have time I'll go to Mr. Technow on labour shortages.

Mr. Fulton, I think I heard correctly that the government did not know of the expertise of Biolyse or other companies able to manufacture vaccines, and only found out by accident.

My question for Mr. Fulton is around expertise and the fact that the government wasn't aware, and only found out by accident when a consulting group made an inquiry. What can the government do to have a comprehensive list of the certified and capacity-ready manufacturers to quickly manufacture critical vaccines and therapeutics when needed in Canada?

[John R. Fulton]

To clarify, Deloitte was the contractor hired by the Government of Canada through the vaccine task force to search out companies like Biolyse.

As far as I know, there are a handful in Canada producing injectables. There are Omega, Sandoz and Biolyse Pharma that I know of. They're three industrial-sized facilities. They reached out, I think, on May 1, 2020. We started a dialogue. We were sending all kinds of documentation, so they—the government and the task force—were well aware that Biolyse existed.

I think what we need going forward is a meeting just like this, where there's transparency and there are independent groups that could look at this—not a task force that the public wasn't made aware of until a few months after it was in existence. Just having this kind of discourse and this kind of conversation now is a help.

If we had a time machine to go back two years and try to put together a group like this to have this discussion.... Biolyse is sitting there with all that equipment, all that expertise and Health Canada approvals for producing vaccines, and it's still sitting idle. They only asked for a few million dollars to hire more contractors and more staff. It could have been up and running.

We tried to use CAMR, Canada's access to medicines regime. I've been calling and sending emails. I met with over 40 different individuals, officials within the government, and we can't get a straight answer on how to use the legislation that I used effectively in 2005-06. They won't have a discussion with us regarding that. They won't start talking, because once the government starts talking about the addition of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, it triggers the addition to schedule 1. Once we're on schedule 1, we can ask for a compulsory licence and move forward with the project.

I had a lot to say here today. Unfortunately, I got cut short, but that's really it. It's having these kinds of open discussions with the public, experts and government officials to really figure out how to solve this problem.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

I'm just going to pivot now to Mr. Technow on labour shortages. A number of witnesses talked about it today.

I just wanted to ask about your business and also ancillary businesses that support your business. We know that labour shortages can be an issue.

Could you just expand a little bit on labour shortages? What is needed to attract and retain workers in your industry and in ancillary industries that support the work you do?

[Oliver Technow]

Thank you for the question. I hope this time I can get through my answer without technical issues.

To provide some context here, during the pandemic we onboarded approximately 150 new employees at BioVectra, despite the challenges of having to do this remotely and with all the protocols in place.

It has also accelerated the realization that if you make up and work towards new technologies—and part of our biomanufacturing strategy in Canada is to make sure that we have new, cutting-edge technologies in the country to respond to future health crises more quickly and more efficiently—you also realize that there's a talent shortage to actually run these processes and fill these new projects and investments with life.

In my industry in particular, we're now talking about all these new technologies. A handful of people in Canada have first-hand experience with these types of technologies. By default, we are actually depending on immigration and attracting talent from abroad. This has been a little bit more of a pronounced situation. Given our company's location in eastern Canada, we have to be creative from the get-go. We have found a lot of really effective ways to attract the right talent from all over the globe.

I would actually predict that this labour shortage we see in our industry will only accelerate. I think studies out there very recently have been talking about a gap of almost 60,000 people—if I got the number correct—to actually just deliver on the current biomanufacturing strategy. That gives a little bit of an idea what's at stake and what's at hand here.

As I said in my presentation, we need to come to the table in private-public partnerships and really tackle this issue from the ground up, making sure that we have the inroads into academia streamlined and have quicker immigration.

As far as the labour shortage on the auxiliary businesses are concerned, I don't think I'm qualified to talk about this a lot. We obviously see some of the challenges in supply chain. As we all are aware, certain parts of a bricks and mortar construction site, like steel, are becoming more difficult to source, but there is also this general topic of the great resignation. That doesn't stop in Canada and it doesn't stop in my industry. It's all over the world. It's in every sector and in every trade, so we have to be a little bit more creative.

My recommendation is, as I said earlier, that we need to aim high. It's not enough to try to make up for other jurisdictions that have some kind of innovative and attractive program in place, because by the time we catch up here in Canada, those guys have already moved ahead.

I really encourage us to have a very ambitious plan and a very ambitious task force in the future that addresses these challenges with sustainability in mind.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Michael Kram]

Thank you very much to all of our witnesses.

Ms. Zarrillo, your time is up.

I will now hand the chair back over to Monsieur Lightbound.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Michael, for chairing this meeting in my absence. I appreciate it.

Thanks to our witnesses for being here with us. It's been very interesting. I've been listening all along.

Members, before we adjourn there is just a small item of business I'd like to get over with.

Witnesses if you want to disconnect, this is committee business at this point, so you may consider yourselves thanked fully by committee members. We appreciate your presence here. Have a great weekend. Stay safe.

For committee members, I believe there have been discussions between the parties and there is consent to adopt Mr. Lemire's motion on competitiveness. I'm just looking for unanimous consent around the room, so that the clerk and the analyst can get to work inviting the witnesses for the study when we come back from the break.

I see a thumbs-up from Mr. Masse. I know Mr. Lemire is on board. I see no objection in the room, so I gather we have unanimous consent for the motion that has been distributed amongst members.

(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you all for your great work.

Have a great weekend. Safe travels and we will see each other in three weeks.

This meeting is adjourned.