Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Vaccine rollout exposes problems

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to a forestry company CEO speak about the prospects for the future. The talk was optimistic and certainly gave one hope for the future.
whitcombe

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to a forestry company CEO speak about the prospects for the future. The talk was optimistic and certainly gave one hope for the future.

But it did get me to thinking because it involved a lot of heavy duty equipment, turbines, and other such stuff for the various operations. The company was purchasing it from European and Asian manufacturers.

So I asked why wasn’t this being made at home? Why wasn’t his company doing the R&D and developing things in-house? The answer, of course, was from his perspective it is cheaper to let others do the research and development and then to simply buy the final product. After the talk, I had several people try to explain to me why this was a better approach. After all, they said, R&D costs money.

But just because someone else is doing the research and development doesn’t mean you aren’t paying for it! The price of all the R&D is included in the cost of the product, along with a measure of profit. And, in this particular case, the company had to adapt its purchases to the conditions under which they would be operating, requiring further costs. I just thought it would have been cheaper to do the whole thing themselves!

Why bring this up?

For two reasons. 

The first is Canada still lags behind other major economies with regard to our expenditures on R&D – both in terms of real dollars and as a percentage of GDP. We seem to be a country quite willing to buy products from abroad rather than developing them here. Ironically, we often ship raw materials to other countries only to buy it back after they have added value. Those value-added jobs could have gone to Canadians.

This is not a new attitude. Indeed, it has permeated our economy for as long as I can remember. It was the source of the “brain drain” Canada experienced in the last century and, arguably, we are still in its grips. We lose a lot of students to the south – and many much further than just Vancouver.

But the second reason has to do with what our politicians are nattering about in Ottawa. The opposition parties are chastising the government for its failure to deliver on vaccine doses. For example, Pierre Paul-Hus representing Charleshourg-Haute-Saint-Charles proclaimed: “We need to get two million doses a week. What will the shortage be this week? It will be two million. What will the shortage be next week? It will be 1.9 million. Who will be left behind because of this failure?”

Of course, the response of Anita Anand, minister of public services and procurement, wasn’t particularly enlightening. She simply pointed out: “we have a very solid plan in place with seven vaccine manufacturers, and our strategy from the very beginning was to ensure that Canadians have access to a vaccine by the end of September.” 

(I am pretty sure she meant every Canadian would have access to a dose of the vaccine…)

What Paul-Hus fails to mention is the number of doses we receive from Pfizer or Moderna is not in the hands of the Liberals. These are companies in other countries. They are not Canadian companies in Montreal or Vancouver. And we have very little in the way of power to compel these companies to provide us with doses aside from a written contract.

We don’t have the capacity to manufacture the number of doses needed in a timely manner. We don’t have a research and development infrastructure, which would have allowed us to participate in the race to a vaccine. We have exported our capacity to be a major player in the world of drug development.

After all, it costs a lot. Better to let someone else do it and then just purchase the results.

Or that is what previous governments seemed to say. 

Ironically, it was under the Conservative party’s watch that Merck packed up and moved its R&D and manufacturing capacity out of Montreal. Maybe if that government had had a little more foresight, we would have a homegrown vaccine or, at the very least, the capacity to manufacture another company’s under license here in Canada.

Under normal conditions, trade allows for the free flow of goods between countries but if 2020 stands for anything, it is that we are not living under normal conditions. And everyone has the same fears – that more lives will be lost to COVID-19 as the rollout of vaccines is delayed.

But why are we not getting vaccines this week? Some sort of government incompetence? No. It is because the company has to revamp its production line so it can meet the demand. 

Maybe Paul-Hus should show a little more patience.