Â鶹ӰÊÓ

Canadians will have to wait until November for the swine flu vaccine, the country's health minister said Friday, prompting a wave of criticism from the opposition, who say Ottawa has been too slow to react.

In Parliament, Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh said that First Nations communities like Ahousat on Vancouver Island are already reporting a flu outbreak, but the government's vaccine will be too late to help.

"Vaccinations should have started already, this government can't even guarantee that a single Canadian will be vaccinated within two months," Dosanjh said.

But Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq defended Ottawa's response to getting vaccine out to Canadians in the coming weeks and reiterated the government's plan.

"Our goal is to ensure that there is a balance between speed with gathering as much information on the vaccine's safety and effectiveness before we start distributing across the country," Aglukkaq said Friday.

"We are on target and we've confirmed that we will be distributing the vaccine to provinces and territories the first week of November."

Also on Friday, the Public Health Agency of Canada said that the federal government "has ensured that the vaccine needs of Canadians are met."

However, Dr. Peter Singer, the director of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, said it is not clear whether the second wave of the H1N1 flu or the vaccine will arrive first.

"What we're facing is a race: It's a race between the virus and the vaccine, and it's probably too early to tell who's going to win that race," Singer said during an interview with Â鶹ӰÊÓ Channel in Toronto.

Because some groups are more vulnerable to the flu than others, Singer said it makes sense to initially give some people priority access to vaccine.

"The government has said that everyone in the country who wants vaccine will ultimately get it," Singer said. "So, this is really a matter of who gets it first as the vaccine rolls out."

Some good news is that recent studies suggest that Canada is going to need less vaccine than planned for.

"We used to think that we would need two doses of the vaccine, most studies are now showing people will only need one dose of the vaccine," Singer said.