Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ambassador de Boer, thank you for coming back, and thank you so much for your own and your team's work on this file.
I have heard that because of the engagement of countries such as Canada, the current proposal on the table is much better than the first one, and a lot of ambiguity has been removed. I'm sure that this proposal still has to be refined further.
About 20 years back in my career, I did a study on technology transfer. For knowledge transfer, many people think you just waive the restrictions and everything will flow automatically, but people don't know that knowledge is composed of recorded knowledge and tacit knowledge. Any waiver can easily make the flow of recorded knowledge available, but the tacit knowledge that is required to see actual vaccine production go on, along with all the other supply management issues, is not so simple.
We are, in principle, not opposed to this. Obviously this pandemic is a very major threat to everybody in the world, and we need to do whatever is required to see the pandemic threat eliminated. However, if, going forward, this waiver is just implemented as is without looking at all the aspects, what are the unintended consequences you think may happen?