For the sake of speeding up global inoculations, eliminating ‘vaccine apartheid’ and drastically reducing the proliferation of deadly variants, the Canadian government should immediately announce its support for the temporary suspension of intellectual property (IP) rights related to COVID vaccines. It’s both the prudent and the right thing to do—for Canadians and citizens of the world alike.

Despite its obvious benefits (ending the current vaccination monopoly, accelerating the global inoculation rate, and speeding up a worldwide economic recovery) and its widespread support, including from more than 100 national governments, the implementation of the TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines is still being held up by a handful of wealthy countries—including Canada.

For the many millions of Canadians frustrated by Liberal incompetence and repulsed by Conservative callousness, this federal election outcome is not a joyous one. And how could it be, when both parties (in differing degrees, granted) are either ignoring the country’s most pressing issues, offering insufficient, piecemeal policies to address them, or are complicit in exacerbating them?

In typical Conservative fashion, the party bungled whatever tentative goodwill they had been cautiously obtaining from LGBTQ2 voters, in a most unbecoming spectacle during a recent vote in the House of Commons. On June 22, during some of the final hours before parliament was to go on summer recess, 63 MPs, all of whom are Conservative, voted against the government’s proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy.

Canada’s role in obstructing India and the rest of the Global South in their attempts to waive vaccine patent rights is immoral, unjust, and completely illogical, propping up a system of extreme vaccine inequality by allowing just 16 percent of the world’s population, all of whom reside in wealthy countries, to maintain control of half of all confirmed vaccine orders.

With an upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organization’s Council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property scheduled for next month, it is not too late for wealthy countries including Canada to do the right thing and support the temporary waiving of intellectual property rights to enable poor countries to import cheap generic versions of patented COVID-19 vaccines—and save many lives in the process.