Mr. Medhora, I want to come back to you.
I want to reference one of the other things we've heard previously at committee. In fact, we had one witness suggest that the movement for the TRIPS waiver might be just as important or more important than the granting of the waiver itself. It's a signal to pharmaceutical companies that governments are prepared to move into this space and play a larger role in determining how vaccine production is structured if the existing industries can't produce in a satisfactory way.
You've mentioned that Canada's bargaining position doesn't change if we don't do anything new here in terms of domestic capacity. Maybe I misunderstood your point, but that's what I took you to mean. Could you speak more to that?
There seems to be a problem right now in terms of global supply and equity of distribution. The TRIPS waiver is part of signalling a willingness of governments to move in, in a temporary and focused way. The other claim that somehow a temporary and limited waiver for COVID jeopardizes the entire IP framework that big pharma has been using to make money over the last 30 years seems a little radical.
Could you to speak to those issues of how we develop leverage for the public interest against well-organized industries with a lot of resources and power? What role does the TRIPS waiver play in that effort?