International Trade Committee on April 23rd, 2021

[The Chair (Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)), Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I call the meeting to order.

This is meeting number 25 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade.

Today's meeting is webcast and is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of January 25, 2021.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108 and the motion adopted by the committee on March 12, 2021, the committee will proceed with its study of international trade and investment policy with regard to selected considerations concerning COVID-19 vaccines.

I'd like to welcome all of our witnesses and thank them for taking the time to appear today.

As an individual, we have Mark Warner, principal counsel, MAAW Law; from BioPharma Services, we have Renzo DiCarlo, chief executive officer; from the Centre for International Governance Innovation, we have Rohinton Medhora, president; and from the Trade Justice Network, we have Jesse Whattam, coordinator.

Mr. Medhora, thank you for the brief you sent to the committee. I invite you to make your presentation.

[Rohinton Medhora, President, Centre for International Governance Innovation]

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for having CIGI join your discussions on this important and timely issue. I look forward to engaging with you and the other witnesses on an interrelated set of issues that bear lots of scrutiny.

By way of introduction, my organization, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, has been before this committee previously. For 20 years, we have been working at the interface of innovation, international affairs, public welfare and prosperity. In the last two or three years, I've had even more of a window into this through the membership on two international panels on structural change and on global health and new technologies.

The committee has set for itself three main questions: first, Canada's position on the so-called TRIPS waiver; second, ensuring a vaccine supply for Canada; and third, ways to accelerate domestic capacity.

Rather than deal with each of these separately, I would like to speak around the issues that I expand upon with colleagues in the CIGI brief and make three sets of observations.

I'll begin with the issue of the waiver. To echo my colleague Nathaniel Lipkus, who appeared before you representing IP Institute of Canada last week, the TRIPS waiver itself is not so much about Canada; it is about ensuring access to technology and vaccines mainly for developing countries. Whether the waiver is granted or not would not make much difference in Canada. In fact, I'm aware of colleagues who make the point that it wouldn't make a difference anywhere.

I don't take a position directly on the waiver, but the waiver, in and of itself, is not the issue. The question is whether, in times of emergency, the global community has access to the technologies and processes it needs, because we're all in this together. That's because of the important spillover effects that the pandemic and vaccines have. There's a broader arsenal of policy issues in which the waiver might be one element, but it certainly cannot be a sufficient condition. In that arsenal of issues, I point to the COVAX facility and funding for COVAX, which is currently underfunded; the price of vaccines; the public subsidies that have gone to the pharmaceutical companies that have developed the vaccines; and the more basic research that public sectors have funded as a result.

There is the question of the negotiations with vaccine companies and the opacity of contracts, so-called vaccine hoarding and indeed what has become now a commonly used term, “vaccine diplomacy”, in which vaccines are used as a tool of foreign policy rather than to improve global health.

There are different kinds of innovation systems. I've said this before and I'll say it again: If you think back to the 1960s, when global hunger, famine and malnutrition were a major global issue, you'll see that Canada joined many philanthropic organizations in other countries. In 1971 a global network of institutes, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, or CGIAR, was created to work on different aspects of agriculture. That group has, in fact, created new strains of different kinds of grains and food, patents are held in the public interest, and although malnutrition is not behind us, hunger and famine, as we knew it in the 1960s, is behind us.

I simply end my first set of observations by making the point that Canada can contribute and has contributed to global efforts to use technology and harness it to improve global welfare, including in the countries where it is needed the most, and intellectual property regimes are part and parcel of that approach.

My second set of observations has to do with innovation. I make this point in the brief, so I won't spend a lot of time on it. I would simply remind the committee that increasingly, wealth is created through research, intellectual property and the marshalling of big data sets that can be prioritized in a way that yields meaningful results, creating both prosperity and equity.

This set of issues, which we may broadly call “intangibles”, in fact accounts for the majority of the value of companies on the S&P 500 and elsewhere. If we're going to be smart about the way we do prosperity and equity, we have to be playing this field. The fact is that Canada is a middle power, and I cite some indicators of that. We are sixth in the G7 when it comes to R and D and in the late teens when it comes to global innovation indexes. In fact, we're a net importer of IP, so we cannot claim to be using the comparative advantage we have in this field.

Not everything here has to do with federal policies. Some issues lie in the provincial domain—for example, the extent to which universities can participate in the research efforts of their faculties when they sign research contracts with foreign multinationals, who then hold the IP; it's not something the federal government can do.

I do think there is a set of coherent and coordinated innovation strategies that wouldn't perhaps yield results in the immediate term for the vaccine issue and for this pandemic but in the long term are really the only way forward.

I come to my third set of observations. CIGI has appeared before you twice recently, on Bill C-4 and on WTO reform. My colleague Bob Fay appeared before you, and CIGI made points then that the institutions and processes we have today date back 60 or 70 years, when digital was barely a gleam in diplomats' eyes.

We have an architectural problem in some senses, and we're using the wrong instruments to achieve the ends we should be achieving. We're using trade agreements—which are about trade, of course—to deal with issues that have important non-economic dimensions, like data. In a piece in The Globe and Mail today, I cite the example of CUSMA, which pronounces on data localization and the content that digital platforms carry, which is about the health of a democracy and the health of our society much more than about commerce. The WTO's e-commerce negotiations are also grappling with data as if it were a commercial issue, when in fact data has so many other dimensions. We have to think of new ways of doing international relations in this era. My colleagues and I have some thoughts on the kinds of processes and institutions we should be thinking about.

To conclude, I should mention that the digital economic partnership agreement that three countries in the Pacific have entered into, and that Canada wishes to enter into, is one way forward. When this committee turns its attention to that set of issues, I look forward to expanding on that as well.

To conclude, I'd simply say, as a good economist would, that there is the short run and the long run. In the short run, options are always limited and less nuanced, but in the medium term and beyond, there is much that Canada can do to improve global welfare, both internationally and at home.

With those few thoughts I will stop. I look forward to your questions.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Dr. Medhora.

Now we'll have Mr. Warner, please.

[Mark Warner, Principal Counsel, MAAW Law, As an Individual]

Thank you again for this invitation to talk to your committee. I appreciate it very much.

These are three very important topics. I guess the first one I'll start with is the issue of the WTO waiver. I'm a trade lawyer, a competition lawyer, an American lawyer and a Canadian lawyer, if you get all that.

My own knowledge on this issue comes from the work I've done in the past for a major pharmaceutical multinational that wanted to get its antiretroviral—that's to say its AIDS and HIV drugs—around the world to Africa and other places. I began working with them to help first get the drugs distributed to certain countries for a dollar a day, and then we gradually built up from that to licensing the manufacture to certain producers in India and in South Africa.

That forms the basis for my saying to you that I think a lot of people are talking about the WTO TRIPS waiver, and they're building off that example from the earlier pandemic, the AIDS pandemic.

There are a couple of things I think people need to remember. When we first started licensing, when the manufacturing companies first started licensing, they weren't really licensing the state-of-the-art versions of the antiretroviral drugs; they were expressly licensing the previous versions and trying to get those to the developing countries.

When you think about what we're dealing with now with COVID in the current context, we're talking about vaccines that have basically have gone from nothing pretty much around last year at this time to getting shots in the arm—not so much around the world, but in many parts of the world—and that just isn't a direct comparison to what we had before.

I'm watching the discussion of the waiver. I think it's important because it's one more device to bring the attention of the world to the important task of getting access to these vaccines to developing countries, but in the short term, it doesn't seem to me that the analogy from the work we did in the past on HIV is really applicable and serves as a precedent for that.

I think the Canadian position seems fine in terms of asking for more study of the issue. I think that's fine. As we go forward, as these vaccines become better developed and as the skill set to make them becomes more spread around, I think we're already seeing the difficulties some of these producers that are at the front of pack are having in scaling up from the lab to the point at which they can distribute. We've seen it with AstraZeneca; we're seeing it now with Johnson & Johnson and their contract manufacturers.

You could see how important it is. We're dealing with examples of vaccine hesitancy around the world, including in the developing world. All it would take is one massive mistake to really throw this enterprise off completely. I don't think we're anywhere near the state where we were when we were dealing with molecules to build antiretroviral drugs. We may get there, at which point, if we do get there, I think some of this discussion will be good.

Before I run out of time, to flip to your second question in terms of the trade agreements, my background that I can bring to you on this is work that I did earlier in my life and my career when I worked at the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. There I was sort of in charge of their work on trade and competition. It was what we call in the trade world “the Singapore issue”.

The reason I bring that up is it seems to me a lot of what we're talking about now highlights the problem of that unfinished agenda from the Doha round and from the Havana charter, if you go all the way back to the beginnings of the international trade organization, which is that there is a link between trade and competition. What we're seeing here, I think, is that one company in particular, AstraZeneca, entered into different contractual agreements with different countries, and some of those appear to conflict. In response to that, the European Union has introduced this monitoring system, which I think probably could be defended with various exceptions in the various trade agreements that Europe is party to, including the CETA.

Depending on how that would turn out—whether a challenge to it would succeed or not—it sure wouldn't succeed on a timely basis. As a practical matter, I don't think the CETA agreement really serves as any way of dealing with that.

To get back to the original point that I was trying to make, I think what we're seeing here is why that earlier agenda of trade and competition didn't stop the discussion. It was just an explicit invocation of an export control or a quantitative restriction on exports. Essentially, if the British and the Americans can do by contract what the Europeans are doing through a monitoring system, I think we're in a whole different world.

At some point, we're going to have to sit down and think about those ideas of the linkages between trade and competition, because it's not working. The European Commission is clearly turning around and saying, “Wait a second. You can't give some money to someone to research something and do a procurement agreement with them and say they have to serve you before they serve us, even if they have a contract to serve us.”

For these reasons, and because of what I'm going to call “unfinished agenda” in the trade community, I don't think trade agreements are really ever going to solve a fundamental distinction like that.

Interestingly, people really haven't gone after the Americans, who are doing much the same thing through their contracts under the Defence Production Act and through Operation Warp Speed, but we can talk about that.

The last comment I would make, on the last topic you talked about, is about domestic production of vaccines. There my background that I would draw from would be my experience as a former legal director of the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade and also the Ministry of Research and Innovation. The titles are so long.

In the context of that, the Government of Ontario had a number of programs when I was there. One of them was a biopharmaceutical investment program; another one was called the strategic jobs and investment fund. Those names may sound familiar to you. What I learned from and observed from that is how difficult it is to get the big pharma multinationals to come....

I remember sitting in a committee meeting that we had for the recommendations that would go to the government on various proposals that would come up. I was always underwhelmed, frankly, because they always dealt with clinical trials, which from my vantage point is kind of the low-hanging fruit of pharmaceutical innovation. As a country, if we're going to really get serious about this and want to be part of that world of vaccine production, we're going to have to have a very serious conversation, which we haven't had for about 30 or 40 years.

In the 1970s, we basically decided to build a generic pharmaceutical industry and create one or more national champions. Ever since that day, we have declared, if you like, a low-level or sometimes higher-level war against the research-based or innovation-based pharmaceutical industry. If we want to have those kinds of companies in Canada, producing on a scale that would allow them to think of us as a place where they might want to do this work, we're going to have to think about our intellectual property rules. We will probably have to think about some of our tax rules. We're going to have to have a broader discussion than what we have had to date.

The last part I will leave you with is that when I returned to Canada, having practised for years outside of Canada, my major client was, as I said, a pharmaceutical multinational client. I did global work for them. The long conversations I had with them about returning to Canada showed me an insight into how that industry sees Canada, and it's not always the way that I think Canadians see ourselves. They were pretty clear to me that if the law firm I was coming to in Canada dealt with three firms—they gave me a Canadian firm and two Indian firms—they would be saying goodbye to ever working with me again.

That surprised me a little bit then, but I put that experience in the Ontario government together with, as I said, the biopharmaceutical investment program. What it said to me is that we have to decide, because if you don't go that route, then you're talking about building out a whole new industry, and that's tough. It's tough. If you think of what the British did, they struck a gold mine. They had Oxford university that came up with one of the vaccine technologies that has scored well here, which is the basis of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Here's the key point: They also had a British multinational innovation-based pharmaceutical company, AstraZenca, that was in a position to commercialize that around the world. Whether it succeeded or not is for people to debate, and time will tell.

If you look at the German case, you see that in Germany there was a small biotech company called BioNTech, and when that German biotech wanted to commercialize, they had nowhere to turn. They didn't even turn to the German multinational companies; they turned to Pfizer, a big American-based company with some experience in vaccines. Not surprisingly, they're the one that seems to be most successful in distributing this stuff around the world. If you think of what it would take if Canada were to build a cutting-edge industry for the next pandemic, whenever that occurs, you'd be betting you could either have Oxford or BioNTech in Canada and that you would have the equivalent of an AstraZeneca or a Pfizer that would say they want to produce in Canada or be based here. Those are two big assumptions.

Right now I know we're all in this very nationalistic mode and we want to talk about reshoring and maybe going back and rebuilding this industry. The truth of the matter is that we have contributed in Canada to this very important struggle through two great Canadian companies. One is AbCellera, of Vancouver, which is working with Eli Lilly on the antibody treatment. We also have Acuitas, I think also in Vancouver, which has provided much of the important lipid nanoparticle technology that forms the basis of the breakout mRNA drugs. We shouldn't be shy about our tremendous contribution, but that, I would suggest, is the contribution for an economy of our size, structured as we are.

At some point down the road we might have to ask, just as with the GM and Chrysler restructuring work I worked on in my previous life, whether the approach here might have been to say, as difficult as it might have been to achieve or for many Canadians to swallow, that we should have tried to get in on the ground floor of Operation Warp Speed by buying our way in, just as we bought our way into the GM and Chrysler restructuring. I don't know to what extent the government really pursued that option. Given how we fit as a country into modern pharmaceutical supply chains, it has always struck me that this is what we should have done. I haven't seen very much conversation in Canada about why we didn't do that, but I keep trying to put that on the table. At any rate, that's for another day.

Traditionally, it seems to be that's how Canada fits into this kind of a global issue. At some point I think we're going to have more realistic conversations about how we would fit into that. I think our cost structures are too high, and there's limited export potential. Do you want to go back to the 1970s, when Canada was building pharmaceutical products and exporting to the world? China wasn't on the market then, nor was India. We have fantasies of returning to this world where Canada was a leader in exporting; that's all over. People may not want to hear that today, but we'll have to deal with it later.

In my view, that's a large part of why I couldn't imagine any of the leading companies that have been the market leaders on this so far licensing to produce in Canada initially. As someone who's been on the other side of those negotiations, I would have been demanding a lot of financial contributions from Canada to do that, because I only have a few people, because I have to go around the world and I have to keep up the quality control. I have to move the inputs around the world and to satisfy one country that I'm going to come to, to license them when I'm not going to be able to export it anywhere because it's too expensive. I wouldn't do that, so I'm not surprised that they haven't done that. As I said, that leaves us with the idea of building our own sui generis big pharma industry, hoping for luck in the next pandemic, and that strikes me as very unrealistic.

I probably talked way too long, but those are my three answers to your questions.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Warner.

We'll move on to BioPharma Services and Mr. DiCarlo, please.

Welcome to the committee.

[Renzo G. DiCarlo, Chief Executive Officer, BioPharma Services Inc.]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Dear international committee, I'm really pleased today to be talking to you as a witness on the subject of Canada's trade and investment policy and the trade agreements and your various points. I'm actually going to be covering off all the points in general throughout my talk. I won't be going item by item, but I will be reviewing each of them in all the comments that I'm making.

Again, my name is Renzo DiCarlo. My background and credentials are based on both my academic and my business experience. I'm a London School of Economics alumnus in stakeholder theory and research, with about 25 years in pharmaceutical GMP and medical research. I've done the management of a clinical trials company and also have been a GMP producer of radiolabelled antibodies, so I'm very uniquely qualified to talk about just-in-time logistics, which is what we're going through today in Canada in terms of the vaccine rollout.

I'm uniquely qualified to talk to the committee about views on strategies and policies on vaccines. I have been the CEO of Biopharma Services here in Toronto for the last 10 years. It's the largest privately held first-in-human clinical research site in Ontario, Canada. We're based in Toronto.

Over the last 15 years, we've provided essential drug discovery to over 200 pharma companies around the globe. We have about 250 leading-edge medical professionals who work here in Toronto and in St. Louis, Missouri, and also in Zurich, Switzerland. Our headquarters in Toronto have been focused on very critical drug development linked to organ anti-rejection drugs and antisense products, as well as COVID countermeasures. Even in the early days of our new normal, last year in April 2020, we actually provided preliminary feedback to the likes of Providence Therapeutics, which, as most of you probably know, is our very own RNA product based in Canada.

In the new normal, it's impossible to separate free trade from COVID safety. Trading blocs, safe travel and COVID domestic health are intertwined in our new reality. One cannot demand a strong NAFTA, for example, without a safe NAFTA. If the U.S. government wishes to maintain a strong and free trade relationship with Canada, it also needs to ensure that Canada is safe and healthy. This means that COVID vaccines coming from Pfizer in Kalamazoo or Moderna in the U.S.A. need to flow freely to Canada, just like other goods and services do now, similar to the comments our other witness just mentioned a few minutes ago.

Michigan should be treated the same way as Ontario by both the U.S. and Canada, whether it's Ford in Oakville or Ford in Detroit, or Pfizer in Toronto versus Pfizer in Kalamazoo or Pfizer in New York city. Free movement of vaccines across the border should be equivalent to the free movement of automobiles from Ford. I think we heard the example of General Motors a few minutes ago as well. If the U.S. government is limiting our vaccines in our darkest hours, then we too should limit critical goods to them. The same philosophy should be applied to the U.K. and also the European trading blocs. Free trade needs to be linked to vaccine free movement and health and safety.

As we all know, and as we're painfully aware right now, infection rates are on the rise in our economy, and our economy continues to weaken as Canada continues to be battered by wave after wave. Wave three is not the last wave, unless 80% of the population is vaccinated by July 2021. The only true path to success here is getting the first rollout of the vaccines completed as soon as possible, with an eye out for the booster dose or third dose, and yes, I'm calling it the “third dose” or the “booster dose”. Pfizer has already announced that it needs to apply a third dose, and we should be able to try to conduct that third dose by year-end, especially for the variants of concern.

Our current normal is not going away and could become worse if we don't start creating trading blocs, coupled with safety, with very specific countries. Unfortunately, we're rewinding history and we're going back to our roots.

This means forging strong alliances with the Commonwealth, the U.S. and western Europe. This virus is not going to be under control until certain countries can control their virus, and this could last as long as five years. I know it is a painful message, but that's my current belief, based on what we're seeing, both with our clients in the international markets and with our drug development partners.

We need to limit our trade and travel with countries that cannot control their infection rates, and especially with the variants of concern, or the VOCs. Yes, I am suggesting blocking travel to certain countries in North America, Asia, the Middle East and South America until those specific countries can demonstrate low infections. We saw in the media that we are talking about limiting travel from certain countries—I think all of you are aware of that—and yes, that also means draconian control measures for people who travel to these specific countries and expect to return home to Canada. It's not the current COVID-19 strain that we should worry about; it is the new COVID-21 that is being created in a country that cannot control its outbreak. We need to plan for that.

We need to start looking forward into the windscreen versus looking at the rear-view mirror, because up to now we've been looking at data from the past and not data going forward. It's the new VOCs linked to mutations, like the B.1.617 lineage, that should be our main focus, and don't be surprised if in a month or two we start talking about other variants that scientists start to detect. We need to look forward and create those countermeasures before the virus creates the measures for us. For example, B.1.617 isn't even measured in certain labs in Ontario, and it's more contagious and lethal than the other VOCs.

This is a breakthrough illness, and these mutations can cause other problems. Also, vaccinations are not 100% effective on some of these severe mutations, so we cannot solve all these problems by adding capacity linked to existing technology, especially when our closest allies should be able to exchange vaccines for us for free trade. Adding capacity on old or current technology will take at least two or three years to implement; we can surely go faster by obtaining current doses from Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. They have the capacity and they are scaling up. Let's find ways on the trading blocs to get those vaccines into our country, because it's important to our allies and to ourselves.

This requires that our trading partners support and foster a healthy and free Canada. We need to leapfrog and support Canadian innovators, however, in developing the next-generation RNA solution for the VOCs that are mutating into new strains. This is where our spending should go: on getting ready for COVID-21 or COVID-22. Our safety and economy really depend on it. Let's support Canadian RNA developers so that the technology resides in Canada, but then we can pick and choose the options for outsourcing to contract manufacturers, whether in Canada or abroad, especially in our free trade zone, to produce innovative products.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. DiCarlo.

We move on to Jesse Whattam.

Welcome back.

[Jesse Whattam, Coordinator, Trade Justice Network]

Hi. Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for having me today.

My name is Jesse Whattam. I'm here representing the Trade Justice Network, which is a coalition of environmental, civil society, indigenous, labour and social justice organizations that came together in 2010 to call for a new global trade regime founded on social justice, human rights and sustainability.

Some of our members include the Canadian Labour Congress, Unifor, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, United Steelworkers, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Climate Action Network Canada, to name a few.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, world leaders have repeatedly spoken of the need for global solidarity to get us all through this once-in-a-century health crisis. Our Prime Minister was among the first to call for global equal access to COVID-19 health technologies. As time has passed, calls for unity have been followed by a disappointing lack of commitment by many wealthier nations, including Canada.

Today I'm going to focus my statement, first, on the fact that we can all agree that we need to vaccinate more quickly and more fairly, and that current production has not been up to the task. Second, that while it's not a silver bullet, the TRIPS waiver would be a step towards realizing that goal and would increase the leverage governments have to deal with the publicly subsidized big pharma vaccine-makers. Third, the “third way” and current TRIPS flexibilities are just not good enough, as the Canadian experience has shown.

Over the past several months, the Trade Justice Network has been working with other civil society organizations to call for Canada to support the waiver. People from across the country, across sectors, and from all different backgrounds have participated. We have hosted panels and meetings and written letters and articles. We've had a House of Commons petition that was recently brought to the floor, and we are awaiting a reply. Last month we sent a letter to this committee and to Prime Minister Trudeau on behalf of 40 civil society organizations that represent hundreds of thousands of Canadians.

As the coordinator of this network, I've been interacting and talking to a lot of people from across the country about this waiver. It's very clear to me that Canadians want this waiver for the global community. There's a resounding consensus that business as usual is not going to cut it. I can hear all the people I've been speaking to, and that's kind of where I'm coming from today.

The early days of the pandemic saw vaccine development, and even the initial scale-up of manufacturing capacity happened quickly. However, today we're facing a scarcity issue. Manufacturing constraints, supply chain barriers and vaccine hoarding have created this scarcity.

Now countries with the highest incomes are vaccinating 25 times faster than low-income countries. Of the 800 million vaccine doses that have been administered globally, over 83% have gone to higher-income or upper-middle-income countries, while lower income countries have received just 0.2%. This global inequality in distribution means that it will be somewhere above 4.6 years before we reach global herd immunity, and the thing is that we won't be out of this pandemic until all of us are.

To meet this unprecedented global demand, solutions must alleviate immediate supply limitations, and we must also establish conditions that allow for longer-term solutions to ensure manufacturing and supply capacity is increased and diversified. For this, we must enable and develop local capacities across the world to independently contribute to a more sustainable global supply system, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

The main vaccine developers could openly share their IP and transfer know-how and technology right now, but so far this has not been sufficient. Even when the WTO encourages companies to have more licensing with other countries, they have no desire to do so because there is no profit imperative there for them. It's clear that global supply should not, and cannot, be dependent on the business imperatives and exclusive rights of pharmaceutical companies holding that technology. Health imperatives and IP imperatives are not always in line. In the case of this global pandemic, we're seen this play out in the extreme inequality of vaccine access.

Further, the charity model that's being used cannot solve the fundamental disconnect between the pharmaceutical company monopolies and the calls from developing and least-developed countries to produce for themselves.

Right now, Canada is allowing large pharmaceutical companies to dictate the majority of the vaccine global supply and the distribution system, competing over a limited supply and leaving billions of people behind, particularly in the global south. We could redirect that to combining efforts to help build global production capacity.

The proposal at the WTO, sponsored initially by South Africa and India, is an important step in creating the policy space to ramp up manufacturing, scaling up, and supplying COVID vaccines and other technologies. It would mean WTO member countries would not have to grant or enforce patents and other intellectual property rights covering COVID-19 vaccines and other technologies. With these barriers and restrictions removed, member states, the scientific side, and suppliers can work together without fear of litigation and trade sanctions under the TRIPS agreement.

As I said and as other people have said, it's not a silver bullet and it's not the only challenge, but it is an important legal option countries need. Temporarily waiving relevant intellectual property rights that right now are simply reinforcing monopolies is an important move, and Canada shouldn't stand in the way of it.

What's more, Canada is claiming that existing flexibilities in the TRIPS agreement, such as those for the issuance of compulsory licences to manufacture patented medicines, are sufficient. While there are a number of important safeguards already enshrined in the TRIPS agreement that countries can use to protect public health and increase access, these flexibilities weren't designed for a global pandemic and aren't enough. It's not one or the other; they aren't enough.

For one, they are only accessible on a case-by-case basis, which can take years to settle. Responding to COVID requires for goods subject to exclusive patent and other IP claims and restrictions to become accessible and affordable now.

Over a year into the pandemic, this business-as-usual approach, premised on voluntary, secretive, limited and restrictive licensing, has failed to leverage global expertise and capacity to scale up manufacturing and deliver equitable access.

As it stands now, vaccine technology and knowledge are being treated as private property by pharmaceutical companies, despite the $100 billion of taxpayer dollars that went into research and the development of technology. As a taxpayer, I'm enraged that this public money was taken to fund research and is now being used for a few corporations to profit as my family, communities and the poorest and most marginalized people in Canada and globally suffer so deeply. As the director of Oxfam put it, “This is a public health emergency, not a private profit opportunity.”

I think that the corporate priorities and imperatives are clear and not surprising. For one, the pharmaceutical corporations involved continue to reject the WTO-led C-TAP initiative as a means of sharing know-how, going so far as to call it dangerous at some points.

As well, at a WTO gathering earlier this month, Pfizer and Moderna said they won't share their mRNA technology vaccines with vaccine firms in developing countries on the grounds that they're far too complex and require a lot of raw materials, which, beyond the obvious condescending nature, is also untrue. Over two-thirds of the WTO members want this, because of the untapped capacity that does exist. Vaccine companies in the global south—to name a couple, Bharat Biotech in India and Aspen from South Africa—have expressed capacity.

Further, this week the People's Vaccine Alliance calculated that over the past 12 months, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have paid out $26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to their shareholders, which would be enough to pay to vaccinate at least 1.3 billion people, which, put another way, is the entire population of Africa.

I think a few of these examples illustrate the imperatives of the status quo that are not going to get us out of this pandemic.

I've heard claims that the private sector is more efficient and leads to more innovation, but the evidence points to the contrary. In the first months of the pandemic, we saw open science at work, leading to rapid innovation through public funding. There are structures and examples that show that without IP rights, a global network of vaccine research and production is possible. While not easy, it is possible.

For the past 50 years, the flu vaccine has been produced by a global network of medical professionals who monitor for emerging strains of a virus and periodically update the formula for vaccinating against it, which I understand is a different formula, but the structure exists. They then make this information available to companies and countries around the world, and as a network of laboratories in 110 different countries, funded almost entirely by governments, it is done without any intellectual property considerations. The difference here is that the imperative is solely on protecting people, not on profit, and this opens up the capacity of developing and updating the vaccine and sharing information with a network of producers.

It's possible; there just needs to be a will.

In closing, we know that the waiver is not the only answer and it's not the silver bullet, and there are certainly other challenges, but it would help break down barriers to scaling up manufacturing and supplying lifesaving COVID-19 medical tools across the world. It can also help build capacity for future pandemics that public health scientists have warned us about.

It's morally unacceptable for leaders of rich countries to allow a few corporations to keep the vaccine technology and know-how under lock and key, selling their limited doses to those who can pay the highest prices as people die. Canada must be part of the global effort to save lives, not an obstacle. Therefore, we call on the Canadian government to please support this waiver now.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Ms. Whattam.

We go on to Mr. Hoback for six minutes, please.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair, and I thank all the witnesses here on a Friday morning, or Friday afternoon, depending where you are in Canada.

Mr. DiCarlo, I'm going to start with you. You've made some comments about a third dose. We can't even secure enough first doses right now. Then you talked about this going on for five years.

Is it general knowledge in your industry that this is going to be an ongoing issue in regard to getting vaccinated, revaccinated and vaccinated again, and we could be in a scenario like we have had over this past year for the next five years?

[Renzo G. DiCarlo]

Pfizer has already stated that it needs to have a booster dose at the end of the two that are being given. I would say that probably if we can try to stay on top of things from an administration point of view, we'd want to try to get the third dose in before the end of the year. Obviously that requires coordination between the federal government, the provinces, the municipalities and the hospitals.

People are starting to reformulate for the variants because as they become more serious and the spike protein changes, those vaccines become less effective. It's very similar to the flu vaccines in terms of having those additional doses.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

In terms of our quality of life, we should be able to get back to something that we had pre-COVID. Is that not fair to say, or are we always going to be facing a scenario of lockdowns?

I guess it depends on the number of vaccines we get.

[Renzo G. DiCarlo]

With regard to your question about five years, pre-COVID is what we used to know as our normal. What we're living now is our new normal. I don't think we're going to get to pre-COVID normal for at least five years. I think there's going to be a trajectory and an evolution.

A lot of that depends on us. It depends on what we do as a country. I'm saying that in both the public sector and in the private sector, everybody has to work together in managing our country to get as close to the old normal as possible, but it's not going to go back to the old normal for at least five years, for many reasons. There are going to be trading blocs and so on and so forth—

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

That's fair enough. I'm sorry; I only get five minutes. Mr. Warner, I'm going to jump to you.

You talked about the hostility that pharmaceutical companies had towards Canada when you were working for big pharma or one of the pharmacy companies. Is that based on the drug policy we have in Canada?

My other concern is that if they have that hostility to Canada and we don't see them moving facilities here to produce vaccinations in Canada, does that mean we're always being held to bringing vaccines from offshore and we won't have that research and stuff? How do we gain some leverage there?

[Mark Warner]

I think we made a choice in the 1970s to promote a generic pharmaceutical industry. It's a choice that has an obvious consequence. I know some of you on the panel are lawyers. If you look at the list of cases on the docket of the Federal Court of Canada, you'll find that there are an awful lot of cases that start with the letter A, because the company with the letter A—

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I only have five minutes, Mr. Warner, so we have to be very brief here. I have lots to get through.

The reason I asked the question is that Mr. DiCarlo is saying that we could be in a scenario in which the virus is mutating and changing. How do we ensure that we have leverage to get vaccines as we go through the next five years? Maybe having one piece of that supply chain is a crucial component. Is there one area we can focus on that allows us to do that?

In the case of the TRIPS waiver, if this thing is changing all the time and if we bring in the TRIPS waiver, what's the incentive for any of the pharmacy companies to actually reinvest in vaccine number three, four, five or vaccine number six?

[Mark Warner]

I'll start with your last question on the TRIPS waiver.

Based on the limited knowledge I have of the agreements that have been made public in other countries, my really strong guess is that Canada has pretty much agreed that we're not going to invoke something like that in our agreements, if we ever get to see them.

I think that if you're going send a message that we're open to pharmaceutical investment, siding with that kind of a waiver would not be a good way of getting people who already have those concerns to want to come and invest in Canada. I think we've struck the balance about right.

In terms of your first question, I think we have to figure out a way to get within the American supply chain in a more constructive way. As I said, my own view of this is we should have bought our way into Operation Warp Speed. We didn't, but we should be looking at those kinds of opportunities to be formally part of what the Americans are doing. I think that's the way we make progress.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

There would be no more partnerships with China, like the mistake we made previously here. That was a little bit of a blow.

I'm looking forward, then. If we want to see this happen in Canada and if we want to make sure we're taking care of Canadians and we want to take care of the globe and we want to make sure we're getting the latest and greatest technology out to everybody, what's the best way to do that, Mr. DiCarlo? Is it that we do this TRIPS waiver, as the NDP and the left propose, and just give the data dump to a bunch of people who actually don't know how to do it and who have no quality controls? Is there a different way of doing it?

We've heard from witnesses who say this isn't a simple vaccine to make. There's a lot to it. What's your expert opinion?

[Renzo G. DiCarlo]

There are a lot of very talented contract manufacturers around the world. I think it really is dependent on where they are in our trading blocs and if we trust the relationship we have with that country.

Yes, you can give the recipe, but I think our priority should be our Canadian citizens first, because, if we're healthy and safe, then we can help other countries. That's my personal view.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

So then—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have four seconds, Mr. Hoback.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Do you want to ask a fast question out there and get an answer?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

No, just add it to Tracy's time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

That's four seconds for you, Tracy.

Go ahead, Ms. Bendayan, for six minutes.