A long-term plan, but what about now?

Well, we’ll certainly be sitting pretty when the next pandemic strikes.

In the meantime, we’re still struggling to get on top of this one, still relying on the kindness of strangers for the vaccines that are the only real hope of returning to normality, still falling further behind in the race to immunize our population.

That’s the gist of the announcement by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Canada has struck a deal with Novavax, the U.S. vaccine manufacturer, to produce its vaccine in this country — but not in time to make a dent in the COVID-19 pandemic that still has us in its grip.

It was clearly meant to be positive news, something in short supply right now. The Canadian Press said of Tuesday’s announcement: “The deal could help Trudeau tamp down the political headache caused by Canada’s skeletal vaccine production capacity.”

Good luck with that. The hard truth is that neither the Novavax deal, nor other federal funding designed to rebuild domestic vaccine production, will bear fruit in time to make much of a difference in this pandemic.

When news of the deal was first leaked, there was a suggestion that doses of the company’s yetto-be-approved vaccine might start being produced at a National Research Council facility in Montreal by late summer or early fall. Two million doses a month, it was said.

But Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne later made clear he doesn’t expect actual vaccine doses to come off the production line until at least “the end of the year.” The vaccine must be approved, the facility has to be built, Health Canada must certify it, and so on.

Given that the government is standing by its promise to vaccinate every Canadian who wants it by the end of September, that means the Novavax doses to be made in Montreal won’t be ready in time. They’ll be for booster shots, for vaccines against potential mutations of the COVID virus, for export to countries left behind in the global vaccine race, or to fight some future pandemic that we cannot yet foresee.

All that goes double for other elements of the federal vaccine production plan. Ottawa is investing in a facility at the University of Saskatchewan that will eventually be able to produce 40 million doses a year, and a manufacturing centre owned by Precision NanoSystems of Vancouver, which will turn out up to 240 million doses a year — but not until 2023.

So this is a long-term plan, designed to rebuild domestic production capacity after decades during which it was allowed to fade away under both Conservative and Liberal governments.

This is the right thing to do. The pandemic has shone a light on something that’s obvious in hindsight: when things get tough, governments take care of their own first. All the signed deals in the world to buy vaccines manufactured in other countries don’t guarantee that the vials will actually appear here on time, in the numbers promised.

The result is that Canada has been left short by both Pfizer and Moderna, the only two companies producing approved vaccines now, and the Trudeau government is wearing that.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to blame the federal government, but it’s far from clear what it should have done differently. Perhaps, as the critics have it, Ottawa wasted time last summer trying to strike a deal with the Chinese company CanSino Biologics, which fell through almost as soon as it was signed. But that wasn’t obvious at the time. There’s no reason to believe some other government would have done better.

No, allowing Canada’s domestic vaccine capacity to atrophy, mostly by foreign pharmaceutical companies buying up Canadian ones and moving production elsewhere, was a longterm collective failure. Hard lessons have been learned, and at least this government is taking steps to correct it.

Not, however, in time to avoid the political heat coming from Canadians who see people in other countries getting vaccines much faster, and from provinces that aren’t shy about deflecting attention from their own shortcomings on the COVID front.

A long-term plan is commendable. But the government needs to do a lot better in delivering on the vaccines needed to deal with our short-term crisis.

All the signed deals to buy vaccines manufactured in other countries don’t guarantee that the vials will actually appear here on time, in the numbers promised