Trudeau and Big Pharma: Not a love story Paul Wells: Why doesn't Canada have a robust pharmaceutical industry? Until the COVID crisis hit, Ottawa spent years putting up 'don't bother' signs. February 22, 2021 A health-care worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a UHN COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Toronto on Jan. 7, 2021 (CP/Nathan Denette) On the bright side, when it comes to vaccines, so far Canada is actually doing better than Australia. That country bet big on a thriving domestic bio-sciences sector. It was making good progress on a made-in-Australia vaccine until December, when it had to scrap its vaccine program because while the candidate vaccine did well against COVID-19, it also produced weirdly high levels of false positives on HIV tests.