Canada needs a publicly owned facility to produce medicine and vaccines

The federal government’s failures to secure domestic production of any of the early vaccine candidates highlighted the enormous policy mistake to privatize the government-owned company, Connaught Laboratories.

A pedestrian, pictured Jan. 11, 2021, walking past a COVID-19-themed mural outside Ottawa City Hall. Last year’s desperate scramble for personal protective equipment, gloves, masks, and gowns, revealed to most people’s shock that for basic medical supplies we were dependent on the goodwill of foreign countries that have authoritarian governments.The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Opinion

BY NDP MP BRIAN MASSE

July 8, 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, Canada’s economy has become more fragile and less resilient than it was, due to decades of government neglect of our domestic manufacturing sector as supply chains have been allowed to be outsourced. While many have raised these concerns for years, this public...

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