Health committee  I think it's such a terrible position for Canada to be taking. Canada is essentially siding with big pharma, which wants to protect their patent rights, and frankly it's quite out of line with what Trudeau would normally be expected to do. He's very interested in his image as a progressive.

Health committee  There are two key things that I think we should keep very much in mind. You described the success of Connaught. There was a reason Connaught was so successful. One of those reasons was that it was very explicitly, right from the beginning, committed to the public good. It stated its goals very clearly as making medication affordable and available to all who needed it.

Health committee  You know, it's not even that I have little confidence; it's that when we're dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, we have to have more than just confidence. We have to have certainty. We have to have real rules in place. What alarms me so deeply about this $415-million investment the government is making in Sanofi is that there seem to be no restrictions.

Health committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate this opportunity to address the committee today. I would like to talk about Canada's lack of domestic vaccine production facilities, which I think has been one of the key problems in Canada's slow vaccine rollout. Last month the Trudeau government attempted to correct this problem by investing $415 million in the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi.