Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak in support of this motion, with great thanks to my colleague for Etobicoke North. We entered the House of Commons together in 2008 and it has been a privilege to serve with her in that time.

This motion's call for a new standing committee on science and research provides the opportunity to highlight how critical the need for this is and also some current examples that illustrate how dire the situation has been allowed to become in this country. First, Canada's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been severely impaired by a lack of scientific capacity and literacy at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Second, our country's lack of domestic research and biomanufacturing capacity has delayed COVID-19 vaccine access for Canadians. We must ensure that this never happens again. I will speak to both of these examples that underscore the importance of this motion in highlighting this important gap in our national capacity.

The Public Health Agency of Canada, PHAC, was established in 2004 after the SARS outbreak exposed massive failings in our country's public health infrastructure at the federal level. The agency was specifically mandated to be Canada's lead organization for planning and coordinating a national response to infectious diseases that pose a risk to human health. However, last fall, several PHAC whistle-blowers told The Globe and Mail that they often struggle to communicate urgent and complex messages up the chain of command inside PHAC. One PHAC scientist told the Globe that key messages often had to be “dumbed down” within the agency because senior officials lacked an understanding of the science.

A series of scathing audit reports have since confirmed and highlighted this troubling lack of scientific expertise and literacy within PHAC. In January 2021, an internal audit of PHAC's COVID-19 response was released through an opposition motion for production. The audit revealed a serious and troubling lack of scientific capacity of PHAC. Among other things, the audit found limited public health expertise, including epidemiologists, psychologists, behavioural scientists and physicians, at PHAC senior levels and a lack of emergency response management expertise and capacity within the agency. It said that PHAC is missing sufficient skills and capacity for risk communications specifically for communicating uncertainty to support the agency's messaging around COVID-19.

The senior medical expertise needed to support Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, in navigating the rapidly changing science of the new virus was slow to be put in place and most likely remains insufficient to provide the support required at the time of the audit. There were a limited number of quarantine officers within the agency at the beginning of the pandemic and it was difficult to staff quickly because this position requires specific education and training. Dr. Tam's office noted that she often receives information in the wrong format and even with inaccuracies. The audit also found that the modelling information critical to the public face of the response and the foundation for strategic planning was mentioned as being problematic in its initial stages because of the lack of a coordinated or strategic approach to the work.

That audit was followed up on March 25, 2021, when the Auditor General of Canada released another audit report on the federal government's emergency preparedness and pandemic response. It also was scathing and, frankly, horrifying. Among other things, the audit found that PHAC had not tested or updated its readiness plans in direct violation of its own internal standards. PHAC failed to resolve shortcomings in Canada's health surveillance information and data systems first identified by the Auditor General in 1999, in 2002 and again in 2008. PHAC did not assess the pandemic risk posed by COVID-19 or the potential impact were it to be introduced in Canada.

As a result, the Auditor General found that the agency underestimated the potential danger of COVID-19 and continued to assess the risk as low until mid-March 2020, nearly a week after the World Health Organization had declared a global pandemic. By then, Canada had already recorded over 400 confirmed cases and community spread was under way. Despite Dr. Tam's assertion that PHAC's assessment that COVID-19 posed a low risk to Canadians was accurate in the moment, the Auditor General found the methodology used to reach that conclusion was neither formally evaluated nor approved.

Worryingly, Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network did not issue an alert to provide early warning of the novel coronavirus. The Auditor General was unable to determine the reason for this oversight. We have since discovered that the government inexplicably allowed GPHIN to be neutered in 2019, a failure that experts have said cost Canada precious time to prepare and worse, without doubt, cost Canadian lives.

Finally, PHAC failed to verify compliance with quarantine orders for two-thirds of incoming travellers, and did not consistently refer travellers for follow-up who risked not complying.

Michael Garner, a former senior science adviser at PHAC who left in 2019, recently told the health committee that the diminishment of GPHIN is a symptom of a bigger problem within the agency: Scientists are increasingly replaced or usurped by senior bureaucrats with no training in public health, resulting in decisions made on the basis of politics. Mr. Garner traced the root of this problem back to 2014, when the Harper government, which was perhaps the most anti-science government in Canadian history, installed a senior bureaucrat as president of public health, which relegated the role of the chief public health officer to that of an adviser. That change created a cascade effect throughout the department, he said. This misguided policy has been kept in place, unfortunately, by the current Liberal government.

I want to turn to research- and evidence-based policy-making, which the motion speaks to.

Canada once had a publicly owned drug and vaccine producer, Connaught Labs, which contributed to some of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century. This lab was profitable throughout its history and made significant contributions to medical research by allocating royalties to universities, where, by the way, most research and development take place today. More importantly, it produced essential medicines and vaccines for Canadians at very low prices while exporting to the world. However, Connaught Labs was sold to the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur by the Mulroney government in the 1980s for purely ideological reasons.

The privatization of Connaught Labs was part of a broader package of market-based reforms to Canadian pharmaceutical policies that were billed as necessary to spur private investment and create jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, something I think all parties agree on. At the core of that approach was the 1987 agreement to extend patent protection in exchange for a commitment from pharmaceutical companies to boost their research spending in Canada to 10% of sales. However, no penalties were imposed for failure to meet this voluntary target. The Mulroney government's policy overhaul also included the start of a neo-liberal trade policy that has provided global pharmaceutical companies with increased protections and market access.

Unfortunately for all of us, the promised research investments and employment benefits never really materialized in Canada. In fact, the ratio of research and development expenditures to sales revenues for pharmaceutical patentees in Canada has been falling since the late 1990s and has been under the agreed-upon target of 10% since 2003. Although the federal government attempts to compensate for this bleak investment by funding medical research and development with public money, it rarely attaches public interest conditions to ensure that the resulting innovations will be affordable and accessible to all who need them.

The NDP believes it is time for a new Canadian pharmaceutical policy that reorients our market-based approach to one that facilitates access to vaccines and critical medications for Canadians in order to protect and promote public health. As a first step, the NDP believes the federal government should immediately re-establish a public drug and vaccine manufacturer in Canada. This would ensure a resilient domestic supply capacity in the event of future public health emergencies and shortages, while facilitating lower drug costs for Canadians through the production of affordable medications.

This re-establishment of public pharmaceutical manufacturing should be complemented by the promotion of an open science approach to drug development that promotes collaboration and data sharing, along with policies to ensure that health technologies developed from publicly funded research serve the public interest. Contrary to big pharma propaganda, most research and development and discovery of new molecules and technology come from publicly funded research at Canadian universities. By combining that research with public medicine development, we can better ensure that we produce innovative medicines in Canada by Canadians and for Canadians at reasonable costs.

Don Davies

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