Mr. Speaker, the second wave of the pandemic has been brutal. We have now lost more than 20,000 Canadians to COVID-19. We have an obligation to those 20,000 Canadians who lost their lives and to the hundreds of thousands of others who survived COVID-19. We owe it to them to fix the problems in our country's biomedical research, development and manufacturing system. We cannot let this happen again.
I want to be clear here: This is not a science problem. This is a government problem. Scientists across the world, including here in Canada, responded to this global crisis with remarkable efficiency. Think how quickly they identified the virus, its mechanism and its genome, and how quickly they were able to create multiple vaccines to protect against COVID-19. I think we can all agree that scientists have done their job.
The breakdown and the reason so few Canadians have been vaccinated to this point is not because of the science. It is because successive Conservative and Liberal governments, including this one, decided that biomedical research, development and manufacturing was not a priority in Canada.
Now the government has finally made a splashy announcement that it is going to support COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing through a deal with Novavax, an American company. The catch is that those vaccines will not be ready until the fall, meaning they will not be ready until after the date the Prime Minister has promised that every Canadian will receive a vaccine. The deal will only help Canadians if the contracts the government signed last year with vaccine manufacturers come up short.
It is February. The time to make this announcement was last year. It is really too late and really too little. I can appreciate the complexity of this. The government had to negotiate contracts with multiple pharmaceutical and biological developers and manufacturers. We did not know which of these companies would lead the way, so we had to hedge our bets. I get that.
This is a global pandemic so the demand for vaccines outreaches the supply. We all understand that. The question here is why is Canada so far behind other countries? The answer is really quite simple: Our government failed us. We were world leaders 50 years ago in vaccine development and manufacturing, a direct result of our exceptional post-secondary institutions. We developed vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, typhoid, polio and smallpox, and we worked with the World Health Organization on global vaccination campaigns.
Now our universities are struggling to remain world leaders in biomedical research and our vaccine manufacturing capacity is gone. What happened? We lost out to privatization. Without adequate support, university spinoffs could not compete with global pharma and Canada's gem, our leader in vaccine production, a company owned by Canadians, Connaught Laboratories, was sold off to foreign interests.
In the 35 years since we had Connaught Labs sold out from under us, we have had 10 governments with six prime ministers, and not one of those governments or one of those prime ministers made restoring our biomedical capacity a priority. COVID-19 is not going to be the last pandemic. We should be preparing for the next health crisis now.
In November, New Democrats called on the government to put Canada back where it belongs: in the vaccine manufacturing business. We need a public company, a Canadian Crown corporation, to manufacture vaccines and critical medicines so we will never again have to face a crisis like this without our own vaccines.
Will the government commit to increasing the capacity of Canadians to create Canadian vaccines?