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The fact Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Procurement Minister Anita Anand refuse to disclose the contracts they’ve signed with vaccine manufacturers raises the question of what’s in them that they don’t want us to see.

They’ve rejected appeals from the opposition parties, Canada’s premiers and provincial public health experts to release the contracts on the grounds this would violate confidentiality provisions, which could lead to their cancellation.

But no one’s asking for information that would void the deals, for example about pricing. The concern is what do they say about the delivery schedule for vaccines.

That is, how many doses are part of each delivery, what is the timeline for delivery and what happens, if anything, if the manufacturers fail to meet quarterly targets in the contracts?

The provinces need this information to efficiently distribute vaccines.

So they know, for example, whether to release all the vaccines they receive immediately, confident more will arrive in time to administer the second dose within recommended time frames, or to hold back half the doses for the second inoculation, if it looks as if there will be more delays like the ones we’ve just experienced.

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It’s inexplicable why the Trudeau government has refused to disclose this information, at least to provincial public health officials, so they can prepare for what Trudeau and Anand say will be the delivery of six million vaccine doses by the end of March.

As Amir Attaran, professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa, recently told Global News:

“The federal government has been gaslighting Canadians on vaccines for months now with delivery timetables that are imperfectly disclosed, frequently changeable and bald assertions about how things will be okay without demonstrating the transparency to show why we should believe it will be okay.

“It’s unfair to the provinces, it’s very unfair to the healthcare workers who don’t exactly need additional stress after dragging the country along for a year … and … there’s very, very serious harm being done to Canadians’ mental health right now.”

While Trudeau said Friday the schedule of vaccine deliveries will be given to the provinces “soon,” all his government has disclosed to date is that it has spent more than $1 billion to obtain options to buy up to 402 million vaccine doses from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Medicago, Novavax, Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson.

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Only Pfizer and Moderna have been approved in Canada to date. All vaccines are two doses, except for Johnson & Johnson, which is a single dose.

On Friday, Liberal MPs on the Commons health committee used their favourite procedural trick — filibustering — to avoid passage of a Conservative motion seeking information on the contracts, supported by the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP.

According to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker, Canada on Friday was in 39th place globally in the percentage of its population that has been vaccinated (3.23%), behind every other member of the G7 — U.S., U.K., Germany, France and Italy — except Japan.

Anand said Friday that Canada will receive 23 million doses of the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines by the end of June — enough to vaccinate 11.5 million people or 31% of Canada’s population of 37.59 million — and 84 million doses by the end of September, enough to inoculate every Canadian who wants to be vaccinated.

No vaccine has yet been recommended for children under the age of 16.

The European Union and the U.S. have released some vaccine contracts, albeit heavily redacted.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com