Science and Research Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 10 of the Standing Committee on Science and Research. Pursuant to the House motion of June 18, the committee is meeting to study antimicrobial resistance.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and the members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

For those on Zoom, at the bottom of your screen, you can select the appropriate channel for interpretation: floor, English or French. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece to select the desired channel.

As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair.

I would like to welcome our three witnesses for the first panel and thank them for appearing before the committee today.

Joining us by video conference, we have Dr. Louis-Patrick Haraoui, associate professor at the faculty of medicine and health sciences at the Université de Sherbrooke; Dr. Gerry Wright, professor at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University; and Professor Kevin Outterson, the founding executive director of CARB-X.

Welcome to all of the witnesses. You will each have five minutes for your opening remarks, and then we will go to our rounds of questioning.

We will begin with Dr. Haraoui. Please, go ahead.

[Dr. Louis-Patrick Haraoui, Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Université de Sherbrooke, As an Individual]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members. I'm very grateful for the invitation to speak to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research about Standing Order 108(3)(i).

Drawing on my own research, I would like to share what I hope to be useful elements contributing to the answer to one of the four questions listed in this standing order: What is driving an increase in antimicrobial resistance, or AMR?

To do so, I would like to focus on armed conflicts. Since 2017, together with Canadian and international collaborators, I have been leading research on the interplay between AMR and armed conflicts. In 2018, I organized a symposium on this topic in Geneva, Switzerland, where the keynote address was delivered by Dr. Tedros, who was then and is now Director-General of the World Health Organization.

The momentum generated by these early efforts was unfortunately interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the problem has not only persisted; it has worsened. The number of active armed conflicts is now at its highest level since the Second World War, with a marked concentration in low- and middle-income countries, where the global AMR burden is already greatest.

Armed conflicts were among the first settings in which AMR was recognized as a novel phenomenon in the 1940s. Although research has since largely shifted toward peacetime and civilian contexts, resistant pathogens continue to emerge and spread rapidly in war zones. This trend has intensified as warfare increasingly unfolds in densely populated urban areas and targets civilian populations, including vulnerable groups such as children.

Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan earlier in the century—the latter involving Canadian personnel—brought renewed attention to this issue after severe antibiotic-resistant infections were observed among wounded soldiers. The medical evacuation of American troops to hospitals in Germany and the United States subsequently facilitated the spread of AMR to civilian health care systems. The war in Ukraine has further underscored this threat, as refugee-hosting countries have reported outbreaks of drug-resistant bacteria.

With accelerating urbanization, cities have increasingly become the primary theatre of war. This shift has transformed not only the conduct of warfare, but also its environmental and public health consequences. Urban combat often devastates housing and critical infrastructure—as has been evident in Gaza over the past two years—releasing heavy metals, asbestos, petrochemicals and other toxic substances into water and soil, and exposing bacteria in these ecosystems to these toxins. Like all living organisms, bacteria are affected by such toxins and must evolve adaptive mechanisms to survive. These same mechanisms drive the emergence, persistence and spread of AMR bacteria.

Contrary to prevailing views that treat AMR in armed conflicts as a marginal topic, I contend that these environments merit close scrutiny as powerful drivers of AMR and as unique sites for studying its dynamics. Just as the Arctic stands at the front line of climate change, so too do armed conflicts represent hotspots where biological, environmental, social and infrastructural disruptions converge to accelerate AMR.

The mistake would be to assume that rising resistance in war zones remains confined to them. Emerging infections and pandemics remind us time and again that microbes respect no borders. As we enter an era of growing geopolitical tension marked by the highest number of active conflicts since World War II and rising global military expenditures, it is imperative to address the intertwined crises of AMR and armed conflicts.

Canada has a strong record of leadership in tackling global health challenges such as AMR. It is time for the Canadian government to renew that leadership by championing international efforts to make the intersection of AMR and armed conflicts a global health and security priority.

I thank you for providing me with the time to contribute to the work of this committee.

I welcome questions or comments you may have.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

We will proceed to Dr. Wright.

You will have five minutes. Please go ahead.

[Dr. Gerry Wright, Professor, Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, McMaster University, As an Individual]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and honourable members. I'm quite grateful for the opportunity to speak to you as a Canadian academic working on the causes of and solutions to antibiotic resistance.

I'm a professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University, where I have led a research team on AMR and antibiotic discovery since 1993. I founded the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research and the David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery. I have advised industry, government and not-for-profits on antibiotic innovation for 25 years. I also founded a spin-out company based on assets discovered in my lab, to further develop new products.

The committee's attention to AMR is both timely and essential. I was a member of the Council of Canadian Academies expert panel that produced the 2019 report “When Antibiotics Fail”. We found that AMR cost Canada $1.4 billion in direct health care expenses and caused 5,400 deaths in 2018 alone. AMR poses an existential threat to Canadian health and prosperity.

My role as an academic researcher is to uncover the molecular basis of AMR, discover potential solutions and train the next generation of scientists. For over 32 years, I've trained more than 100 master's and Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows and technical staff, yet very few remain in Canada or continue to work in AMR research. Why is this? The reasons are structural. Canada currently has limited biotech and pharmaceutical R and D capacity, especially in antibiotic discovery. Rather, graduates are drawn abroad to vibrant biotech sectors in Boston and California and Europe.

In universities, building and sustaining an internationally competitive AMR lab in Canada is very difficult. Academic scientists work like small businesses. We have to recruit talent. We have to generate product, which in our case is high-impact, internationally competitive research, and we have to fund it. We do this through securing grants. In Canada this is primarily through the CIHR.

It's instructive to understand how these grants are given out. These are reviewed by volunteers in panels organized by scientific discipline. At the CIHR, however, there is no AMR panel. Instead, AMR projects are lumped in with projects in bacterial physiology, fungal biology and parasites. Contrast this with areas like cancer and cardiovascular disease. Even behavioural scientists enjoy multiple specialized panels. This structure disincentivizes young investigators from pursuing AMR work. Despite the global urgency, Canada risks losing academic capacity in this field.

What happens if you discover something exciting in a lab that might turn out to be a new medicine? Well, there we're very challenged as well. Decades of experience have shown that the biotech sector emerges from discoveries made in academic labs, yet Canada lacks early-stage funding mechanisms to bridge the gap between discovery and application. You'll hear about programs like CARB-X, which help internationally, but their domestic opportunities are scarce. Advancing discoveries sufficiently to be attractive to agencies such as CARB-X requires different resources.

A proven model that's worth emulating, I think, is the U.S. small business innovation research program, the SBIR. This provides competitive, non-dilutive grants to support start-ups commercializing academic discoveries. A Canadian SBIR-style program would foster biotech entrepreneurship, create jobs and accelerate AMR innovation. As an illustration, my lab recently discovered a new antibiotic, which we published in the journal Nature last spring, that targets several pathogens on Health Canada's priority list. We want to develop it in Canada, but without early-stage push funding and downstream pull market incentives, these assets risk moving abroad, along with their economic benefits.

In closing, I want to urge the committee to act on two priorities. I would ask you to support an increase in overall CIHR funding and create a dedicated AMR research stream to strengthen Canada's scientific foundation in this area. Second, I believe we need to establish a Canadian SBIR-like equivalent to ensure translation of discoveries from academia to industry and to ensure that Canadians benefit from homegrown innovation. I think Canada could lead in the global response to AMR and protect both our public health and our economy.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Dr. Wright.

We will now go to Professor Kevin Outterson.

Please go ahead. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Professor Kevin Outterson, Founding Executive Director, CARB-X]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and honourable members of the standing committee.

My name's Kevin Outterson. I'm the Austin B. Fletcher professor of law at Boston University and the founding executive director of CARB-X, which is the world's largest non-profit partnership supporting the development of treatments, vaccines and diagnostics to combat AMR. CARB-X is proud of the fact that Canada has supported CARB-X since 2023.

I'm going to focus my remarks today on point four—Canada's role in financing innovation, a complementary mix of push and pull incentives to support new antibiotics—but I have to say that the first two witnesses were excellent, and I support what they said as well.

For more than a decade, reports from around the world, including the review on AMR from the United Kingdom, official communiqués of the G7 and the G20, and, most recently, reports from Global AMR R&D Hub—of which Canada is a board member—have all emphasized the importance of combining both push and pull incentives to accelerate innovation and fix that broken market for antibiotics.

In most therapeutic areas, like cancer or something, the best new drugs are rapidly and widely used by doctors and patients. That leads to robust sales, because people want to use the new, innovative drug, but for antibiotics, we take a very different approach. We keep the best new drugs on the shelf for the first five to 10 years, so resistance is delayed. We prioritize preserving their precious power through stewardship. Now, this is excellent for public health, and it's the right thing to do, but it drives the companies behind these drugs into bankruptcy if we pay them based on only the volumes used, especially in those early years.

I served as a member of a different Council of Canadian Academies expert panel, with the “Overcoming Resistance” report issued two years ago. It built on the prior CCA report, including the one that Dr. Wright was on, and the pan-Canadian action plan. The consensus from that report is that without new incentives, the antibiotic innovation pipeline remains perilously thin, and Canadians will lack access to new antibiotics...worse than any other G7 country. It also concluded that both push and pull incentives were needed to restore health to this pipeline and to protect the foundations of modern medicine from assault from these bacterial infections.

Push and pull incentives effectively address different parts of the same problem. Push incentives, like what Dr. Wright was just calling for, SBIRs in Canada, reduce the cost and risk of developing new antibiotics. CARB-X is an example; SBIRs or basic research funding are other examples. Pull incentives, on the other hand, reward successful development—something that makes it to approval—but ensure that the companies can sustain production and support stewardship once the antibiotic reaches the market. The United Kingdom today has the best working example of a pull incentive. Both of these are essential. They work together.

Canada has already begun to act on this challenge on many levels, including through the Public Health Agency of Canada's—PHAC's—investment in CARB-X over the past two years. CARB-X is supported by six G7 governments, including Canada, and three charities. Our important role has been recognized by the G7, G20 and UN General Assembly. Twenty-two of our supported products, so far, have entered human clinical trials, which is a remarkable success at this stage.

We hope that our important partnership with the Canadian government continues—it's been represented by PHAC in the past but, now, also by the newly established Health Emergency Readiness Canada, HERC—and that it will continue at a level commensurate with other G7 governments. This would be approximately $6 million Canadian per year from Canada. The U.S. government contributes about $55 million Canadian per year, Germany $15 million and Italy about $12 million.

Push incentives lower the cost of R and D, but we also need the pull. They replace revenues lost, because we're careful with these antibiotics in the early years, but they need to reflect the broader social value of these antibiotics. They're necessary to keep these late-stage investors—as we'll hear from Dr. Skinner in the next panel—coming into the market.

Earlier this year, with colleagues, I published a paper in one of the Lancet journals, talking about the fair share gap in antimicrobial innovation. It calls for each member of the G7 to pay their fair share of the innovation costs without free-riding. Currently, only two countries across the EU and G7 have achieved fair share: the United Kingdom and Italy. Canada, I'm afraid to say, came in last place, because the two drugs evaluated are not available here in Canada yet. The paper calls for Canada to contribute its fair share, which I calculated, in that paper, to be approximately $13 million U.S. in revenue per new drug, per year, in Canada, out of the global total of $363 million U.S.

If we do this and continue the efforts of both push and pull, I'm confident that Canada can help to address its part in solving this global problem.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

Thanks to all three witnesses for their opening remarks.

We'll now proceed to our rounds of questioning.

We will start the first round with Mr. Baldinelli.

Please go ahead. You'll have six minutes.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being with us this afternoon.

There were very interesting comments from our witnesses today. It's interesting to get their comments on how we can better incentivize the work that needs to be done, particularly here in Canada.

Dr. Wright, as an alum from McMaster, I welcome and thank you for everything you're doing, including the work at the Global Nexus School for Pandemic Prevention and Response.

Recently, we heard from a couple of witnesses who spoke about the concern from the Health Canada special access programs in terms of the development of the antimicrobial therapies. They mentioned that only three out of 18 new antibiotics launched worldwide are available here in Canada, and the notion of what that impact is. On Monday, we had a Dr. Hamelin come forward. She said that Canada is last in the G7 in providing access to medicines. She indicated that that's for all medicines, and I think that touches on some of the comments you made with regard to push and pull.

You mentioned, Dr. Wright, the notion of funding for the research side. You indicated the work that you—among many—have done and the $1.4 billion that this is costing our provincial health care systems, yet we're spending only $1.25 billion at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research right now, prior to a budget in a couple of weeks. We've heard indications from the government that they've talked to their agencies and departments and are asking them to find savings of 15% over the next three years, so precious dollars could be limited in that capacity.

It's quite concerning to consider that they're estimating a budget deficit of about $68 billion to service our debt, when we're spending only $52 billion on health care. In fact—I repeated this earlier—what's more shocking is that the Province of Ontario spends—for the province—$80 billion, while we're spending only $52 billion for an entire country.

I'd like to ask a question with regard to how we go about furthering those push incentives and opening up the availability through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to ensure that more research dollars flow to the AMR side, as opposed to other initiatives, because you're saying that under peer review it seems to be that the larger issues of concern, such as cancer, get more of the funding than, say, an AMR study would.

[Dr. Gerry Wright]

I can speak to this only in the sense that what we don't want to do is rob Peter to pay Paul. I think it's important to realize that this is not a zero-sum game for us. We need to fund AMR commensurately, the way we do other really important biomedical and clinical research problems.

I'm not suggesting that we should take money away from other areas to support AMR, but I do think it's important for everyone to realize that we use most of our antibiotics in the hospitals to help cancer patients, for example, and to help patients who undergo cardiovascular surgery. AMR plays a vital role in all of these areas. I think it's just incumbent on society as a whole to understand that this fundamental research is funded in Canada through the CIHR, and that what we want to be able to do is support that to a greater extent than we are right now.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Any potential cuts in funding to CIHR could have health consequences down the road if that's an avenue that sees reduced funding in the next couple of years.

[Dr. Gerry Wright]

I think that's fair. That's where our fundamental medical research comes from. If you cut that fundamental medical research, there will be consequences.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

You indicated in your remarks the development of a new drug, I think, or a therapy. What precluded it from getting to the actual development stage? Can you explain that? I remember that McMaster was working on a nasal vaccine development during the COVID time period. How did that come about?

[Dr. Gerry Wright]

That vaccine is currently in stage two clinical trials. It's still a going concern. We're very excited about those opportunities, not just for COVID but also for the delivery of many other vaccines for respiratory infections going forward. That intellectual property and that strategy are still here with us at McMaster. We're excited about it.

With respect to some of the other challenges in making drugs, the short answer is that drug discovery is very hard and can fall apart in many ways. In discoveries that we've made, getting them down towards additional development is where you start to realize unexpected toxicological issues. This is why drug discovery is so expensive. It takes a lot of money, and it's not terribly exciting discovery science that students want to do. It's very careful analysis going forward, and that's one of the challenges that we have here.

In our case, a lot of that was funded by the NIH in the United States, not CIHR. For the current drug candidate that we're trying to move forward, we're looking mostly to Europe to get funding for that, but we're also being supported by the NIH right now.

CIHR funded the initial discovery, but once that discovery has been funded, there's really no mechanism in Canada to move these things forward so that we become attractive to, say, Dr. Outterson's CARB-X.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

That's a great line.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

We will now proceed to MP Rana for six minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much to all of the witnesses for being here with us on this Wednesday evening.

Dr. Wright, you are from McMaster University, which is next to my riding. I really appreciate that your university is doing a lot in different fields, especially at Innovation Park and in isotope production, for patients around the globe.

Along with that, McMaster University has developed a globally recognized program dedicated to antimicrobial resistance. What key factors contributed to the successful launch of this initiative?

[Dr. Gerry Wright]

Thank you for that, and thank you for highlighting this concentration of antibiotic research that's at McMaster, which I think is unique in the country.

To be perfectly honest, the way that happened was through the benefit of philanthropy. We, at McMaster, have benefited from families and individuals who have given to this area, understanding that it was underfunded, understanding that there was a research gap, and understanding that the talent and the solutions were actually here to be exploited. That has been game-changing for us.

The other part of this story that I think is worth putting on the table is the absolutely transformative effect that a Canadian program called the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the CFI, has had. The CFI is how we bring research infrastructure into our labs, into universities across Canada. We have benefited tremendously from that. My colleagues around the world are in envy of the CFI. I think it's important to recognize that we really want to maintain that, because it's been game-changing for us to be globally competitive in this field.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

You're familiar with the David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery at McMaster University, I know. It is at the forefront of Canada's fight against antimicrobial resistance. With a focus on cutting-edge research and global collaboration, the centre plays a vital role in addressing one of the most pressing health challenges of our time.

What led to the establishment of the David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery at McMaster University, and why was Hamilton the right place for it?

[Dr. Gerry Wright]

This, again, was the philanthropic donation of Mr. Braley, who, unfortunately, passed a few years ago. He was a local Hamilton businessperson who really wanted to invest in McMaster, understanding that we had critical opportunities here to do good things. With his help, we've been able to create a critical mass of researchers who are working on AMR and—in broad strokes here—things like the vaccine that we talked about before. This was one of those really important roles that individuals can play in shifting the research landscape, the scientific landscape, within their communities.

For us, folks like Mr. Braley and folks like the DeGroote family have been just absolutely game-changing.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

How has government support been critical in advancing the centre's research on antimicrobial resistance?

[Dr. Gerry Wright]

We've been able to leverage provincial support with some of the Braley money, which has been important. That was several years ago. I mentioned, as well, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. There's a core laboratory at McMaster that's absolutely second to none in the world and is focused on antibiotic discovery. That would not exist without the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. It's simply a non-starter. That has been mission-critical for us.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

What are the biggest bottlenecks in antibiotic discovery, and how can we address them?

[Dr. Gerry Wright]

As I touched on in my brief, the biggest one I see is how we keep our brightest people here in Canada working on this problem. Can we find a way to fund the translation of discoveries that are made in the lab further down the development pathway?

As Dr. Outterson told us, this is an area where private equity is not going to be the solution, at least not in the short term. We need some help if we're going to be able to move this forward. Keeping the talent here is mission-critical, and finding a way to keep the funding going is critical.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Kevin Outterson, how important is international coordination for tackling AMR?

[Prof. Kevin Outterson]

This is not a problem that any one country, even wealthy G7 countries, can address on their own. It requires international work, because none of us is capable of doing it by ourselves.

If we're going to do a pull incentive, it makes no sense for the United Kingdom to do it by themselves, even though they've done an excellent job. It won't have impact unless the rest of Europe, the rest of the G7 and, eventually, the U.S. join.

If I could mention international co-operation with Dr. Wright, I've been to McMaster several times. I've been their guest for a day in which there was a lecture series. I know the world-class scientists they have there. Their sources of funding, in addition to Canada, are the U.S. NIH and European sources. I hope Dr. Wright's new molecule from Nature applies to CARB-X in the near future.

These things, in order to work.... He's identified this lack of an SBIR in Canada. Most U.S. applicants and many European applicants have received a couple of hundred thousand dollars after they've spun out in order to get their data lined up for an application to something like us. We're a charity. We don't take equity, but we require certain amounts of data. It's hard to do that without this extra translational device called an SBIR in the United States. It goes by different names—