Last week, with the Premier, we were thrilled to welcome Moderna’s multi-million-dollar partnership with Novocol Pharma in Cambridge. They will expand vaccine manufacturing in Cambridge and ensure faster, more reliable access to life-saving vaccines. Not only will this investment create good-paying jobs, it will provide our health care workers and families with more reliable access to life-saving vaccines, helping to ensure we no longer have to rely on other jurisdictions to keep us safe.

Speaker, with the $4-million investment through our Ontario Together Fund, Novocol will add to their 500-plus highly skilled workers. It’s hard to keep up with the billions in life science investments: Sanofi, Roche, OmniaBio, AstraZeneca, Novartis; this list goes on and on, Speaker. The momentum of investments by these companies is a vote of confidence in our life-saving sector.

Speaker, think of where we were when the pandemic struck. We had almost zero PPE being built in Ontario. Today, we’re at 74%, and tomorrow, when the nitrile gloves are built in London, we’ll be at 94% of all PPE manufactured.