QUESTION PERIOD — Health
COVID-19 Vaccine
December 3, 2020
Honourable senators, my question is for the government leader in the Senate. Senator Gold, the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research requested just $10 million to produce an antibody treatment they had created. The federal government denied them funding, despite spending $175 million to fund an antibody treatment through AbCellera, which was moved to Eli Lilly in the U.S. The University of Toronto’s antibody treatment has been readily funded by the Italian government.
You just said something very interesting in answering Senator Galvez’s question. You said our ability to produce a vaccine slipped away from us. I think that is very true.
Why was the Government of Canada unwilling to support this fully Canadian COVID-19 treatment?
Senator, thank you for your question. I don’t know the details of the particular request that was made or exactly to whom it was made. The funding of scientific research is not something that is done by individual ministers or cabinet. There is a properly peer-reviewed and structured process for this.
I am unable to answer your specific question, but I would not make any assumptions that it is the government that denied funding. I just don’t know what funding agency was responsible, what the criteria were for the program to which they applied, nor the reasons for the decision, which was an unfortunate one, I take it, for the university project.
Senator Gold, yesterday Senator Seidman asked you about the order of distribution for the COVID-19 vaccine. Our colleague pointed out that the Prime Minister and the premiers agreed that the order of who gets the vaccine first should be consistent across Canada.
On Tuesday, the Prime Minister said:
. . . there seemed to be a consensus that we should all agree across the country on what that list looks like and make sure that it is applied fairly right across the country.
Yet, you told the honourable senators yesterday that it is the responsibility of the provinces and territories to make their own decisions on their own priorities for distribution. Leader, who is correct, you or the Prime Minister?
Thank you for your question. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I might answer as King Solomon might have answered: I think we’re both correct. But there was wisdom behind that, senator.
The truth is that as desirable as it would be to provide uniformity and reassurance to Canadians who don’t spend their time, as I did in a previous life, worrying about federal-provincial relations, the fact is that it’s a constitutional jurisdiction that belongs to the provinces.
We’re all in the same boat in this pandemic and we would like to have the same rules apply to all of us. That’s why the federal government and the provinces work together in an attempt to find uniform standards.
The Prime Minister is right that it’s desirable, but I believe that I’m also right in reminding us that, ultimately, the provinces are sovereign in this particular area.
