Mr. Speaker, we are now one year into the worst medical catastrophe in our nation's history. This past week, the Prime Minister announced that Canada would finally be ready to start producing vaccines, hopefully for the beginning of next year. In the meantime, many more people have died and countless businesses will go under.
How did it come to this point that Canada does not have the capacity to keep its own people safe? Over a century ago we established the Connaught Labs to be vaccine self-sufficient and we were a world leader. Then Brian Mulroney sold it off. It was Canadian public research that created the Ebola vaccine and Stephen Harper gave it away to the Americans.
The Prime Minister has spent this last year trusting that the market and other countries will keep us safe. Where was the sense of urgency? That is the lesson we need to learn from this: to mobilize manufacturing to be ready, to bring the best Canadian minds to the table and to ensure that Canada will never, ever again be left hoping that some foreign corporation or country will look after us when we have the skill to do it here in Canada.