Madam Chair, as far as I know, the investments that were announced were not directly aimed at increasing our vaccine production capacity. They might help increase capacity, but they were not intended to produce more Canadian-made vaccines. Perhaps I misunderstood what was said about that.
At the start of the pandemic eight months ago, the government decided to negotiate contracts to purchase vaccines from various pharmaceutical companies. There were many risks to be managed, and it certainly had to assess the possibility of immediately investing in Canada's vaccine production capacity. At that time, the government did not go with that option, and it chose to sign contracts instead.
I would like to know why the government did not decide to immediately increase production capacity eight months ago, so that now, eight or ten months later, we could produce the vaccines ourselves without depending on contracts with foreign pharmaceutical companies.