Vaccine Sovereignty as a Pillar of Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy

Canada’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed a surprising and troubling vulnerability. In the midst of that global crisis, we lacked the domestic capacity to produce the one vital tool needed to protect our population. COVID vaccines were developed with unprecedented speed, yet Canada depended heavily on foreign manufacturing and strained global supply chains to access them. This dependence is often framed as a public health shortcoming. Perhaps it is more accurately understood as a failure of national preparedness.

In the new geopolitical reality, vaccine capacity must be recognized as strategic infrastructure. Like energy systems or critical minerals, it underpins national resilience. A country that cannot rapidly produce and deploy vaccines is not fully sovereign in any meaningful sense.

Vaccines are typically treated as either elements of a healthcare system or as humanitarian goods to be charitably donated or even politically leveraged. But their function is broader. As we learned during the pandemic, vaccines sustain economic continuity, preserve workforce functionality, and can even stabilize institutions by keeping their doors open and their personnel working. During the COVID-19 crisis, delayed vaccine access prolonged public health restrictions, deepened economic losses, strained multiple social systems and institutions, and revealed inequities and lightly buried social tensions. The central role of biological threats in shaping national stability was thus brought into focus: such threats aren’t just physical, but are also social, emotional, political, and economic. 

From a defence perspective, biological events can compromise national capacity without conventional kinetic conflict. This is true whether the events are naturally occurring, accidentally released, or deliberately engineered. Armed forces cannot operate effectively in the presence of uncontrolled infectious disease, nor can the civilian systems that support them. In such contexts, vaccine production is essential to readiness.

Despite this realization, Canada has yet to treat vaccine manufacturing as part of its defence-industrial base. Policy responses remain largely reactive and based on procurement rather than production. Investments made during and after the pandemic have lightly improved domestic capacity, but they have not yet coalesced into a coherent long-term strategy. Vaccines are still approached as products to be acquired in emergencies, rather than as capabilities to be sustained.

This approach stands in contrast to other strategic sectors. Governments routinely support domestic capacity in areas such as energy and technology (e.g., semiconductors), recognizing that market access alone does not guarantee security. The same logic applies to biomanufacturing. Reliance on global supply chains during periods of high demand creates predictable vulnerability, as nations prioritize domestic needs and restrict exports. Recall that during the COVID crisis, Canada was forced to dip into COVAX, a scheme created to ensure vaccine distribution to the world’s poorest countries, to secure our own supply.

Modern vaccine platforms further strengthen the case for a strategic approach. The mRNA platform is highly adaptable, enabling rapid responses to novel pathogens while also supporting advances in cancer therapeutics, rare disease treatment, and biodefence. Investment in this and other platforms is therefore not a narrow health expenditure but a driver of broader innovation. Other countries, including the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have embedded biomanufacturing within their industrial strategies. Canada has the scientific expertise to participate in this space, but lacks the policy integration required to sustain it.

The concept of sovereignty itself must evolve to reflect these realities. National strength has traditionally been measured by territorial control, military capability, and economic independence. In the new paradigm, though, these are insufficient descriptors when biological threats can now disrupt societies at scale. Preparedness depends not only on response plans but on the ability to generate and distribute countermeasures quickly and reliably. Without domestic vaccine capacity, Canada remains exposed to both acute crises and slower-moving threats, such as antimicrobial resistance and climate-driven shifts in infectious disease patterns.

Addressing this gap does not require complete self-sufficiency. But it does require deliberate investment in standing capacity. Facilities, skilled personnel, disease surveillance (for assessing timing and threat), and regulatory pathways must be maintained between crises. Flexible manufacturing platforms should be prioritized to ensure adaptability, and governance structures must align health, innovation, and defence objectives within a unified strategy.

The lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic are manifold. But among them is this sobering realization: in matters of biological risk, dependence is vulnerability. Canada cannot claim resilience while outsourcing the means to protect its citizenry.