International Trade Committee on Dec. 10th, 2013

[Jason Langrish]

Yes.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Which one of your European companies would benefit most from this trade agreement?

[Jason Langrish]

Which one of our European companies?

That's a good question. The devil is in the details.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Right.

[Jason Langrish]

That's a tough one. I don't know. It will probably be a company like Siemens, or perhaps Rio Tinto, a miner that bought Alcan. They would probably say they'll benefit, in some cases through tariff elimination, or in some cases by the movement of their workers. I mean, it depends, right?

In other cases, it could be an Alstom. If the government procurement contracts become fully open and Alstom scores a $2 billion contract on the Toronto Transit Commission, let's say, then they'll be the biggest beneficiary, but we don't know.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Okay. Thank you very much.

Now we'll share our seven minutes with Mr. O'Toole and Mr. Cannan.

The floor is yours.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll be brief. With all this talk from the NDP about the devil this morning, I think there's a tweet in there somewhere.

Ms. Benczkowski, I want to take a moment to comment. I heard your CEO on CBC Radio during my five-and-a-half hour drive through snow to Ottawa yesterday, and I want to compliment you on the work you're doing. Certainly some of the numbers that were expressed at the rise of Alzheimer's and dementia sufferers in the next decade and a half—which I think was the period chosen—and the challenges of working within the long-term care environment, which was the focus of the program, and some of the recent violence....

It was refreshing to hear that your group is considered one of the world leaders and was invited by Prime Minister Cameron personally.

I just wanted to steal a minute to congratulate you on that and your important work, and to thank you all for your advocacy.

[Debbie Benczkowski]

Thank you.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for being here. I too echo the comments to both ladies on your dedication to your organizations.

Debbie, you have appeared here before, and I actually just retweeted one of my colleague's comments about the upcoming summit tomorrow on the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and its important work.

I represent the constituency of Kelowna—Lake Country in the Okanagan, and demographically it has the third highest population of seniors...so it's a very significant gerontology study for UBC and UBC Okanagan. I appreciate your efforts.

From your perspective, you're supportive of CETA because of its strength and your hope that the pharmaceutical industry will work together with EU partners to come up with a cure for this illness.

Is that your perspective?

[Debbie Benczkowski]

Yes, absolutely.

I think our major wish for Canadians who are living with this disease is that they have access to hope. I think that is the thing. You heard also from Durhane of the same kinds of issues. When we don't know the cause or the cure for a disease, hope is the best thing we can offer people. That's what we hear from Canadians across the country.

As I said, 747,000 Canadians are living with this disease today. It's going to balloon to over 1.4 million Canadians in the next decade or so. This is us. This is our parents. This is our sisters and brothers.

We said that in 2011 the baby boom generation started turning 65. We have this enormous wave of people who are coming. We know that the impact on our economy is going to be tremendous, and without any cure, without any treatments that are helpful to people, the cost will not be able to be contained.

When we see the investment that's been made in diseases like HIV/AIDS and cancer, although the people who are living with those diseases are not cured, they certainly have the ability to live with more hope than people with dementia have right now. We hope that this kind of agreement interest will create interest in doing research and innovation in Canada, and also offer people with dementia the opportunity to access clinical trials as well. That's hugely important.

We have a project right now where we're trying to encourage people with dementia to participate in clinical trials. We know there will be an increase in research dollars, and thankfully the Canadian Institutes of Health Research is putting more dollars into dementia research and the Alzheimer Society of Canada funds dementia research. But we know that in order to get the approximately 15,000 people required over the next few years to participate in all these studies, we need 150,000 volunteers to do that.

We want to maintain this momentum. We want to maintain the access to hope for our folks who are living with the disease. That's our priority.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you.

Thanks also to you, Ms. Wong-Rieger, for your passion and offering hope for your members of the Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders. I've met with your members in the past, and it's obviously something that's not as profiled on a day-to-day basis as some illnesses, but obviously affects Canadians from across the country, so thank you for your work.

To Jason, thank you for coming back to the committee and for the stability we have. I've been here since 2006 so I think that, with our strong, stable national majority Conservative government, hopefully we can continue to move forward.

I want to share the fact that there is optimism and hope. In October, month Canada had a $75 million trade surplus. So we're moving in the right direction, and CETA, together with NAFTA, is potentially going to open a combined market of about an 800 million people.

One of the concerns is that small business is still the bread and butter of the industry and job creation. I spoke with our Kelowna Chamber of Commerce on Friday, and the EU is the second-largest foreign investor in Canada. It says basically that one in ten Canadian jobs is linked to foreign direct investment and that CETA is going to open up doors to EU, which is already the second-largest foreign investor. As executive director of this group, can you maybe share your perspective on where you think the foreign investment from the EU will create an increased number of jobs and in which sectors Canada will benefit from this?

[Jason Langrish]

Picking sectors is a bit of a mug's game. I always cite the example of the wine industry in the FTA with the United States. It was supposed to be decimated and it bloomed—

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

It's a good choice coming from the Okanagan—

[Jason Langrish]

—so I'm hesitant to pick who will win and who will lose. But, you know, Canada has a market of a certain scale. We have some big companies, but we don't have as many big companies as China, the European Union, or the United States. That's a reality of a smaller domestic market, and you aren't going to change that, although you will have some big champions.

What that means is that you go down to the next level of business development, which tends to be middle-sized and SME-type operations. Some of those can have export-driven operations and some of them can go and invest internationally, but I would think if you look at the lion's share of their operations, they subcontract. They contract to governments or they subcontract to larger firms that deliver services globally. For example, they take the advantage of Bombardier, a Canadian company that goes all over the world and has investments all over the world. A Canadian firm that gets established with Bombardier, delivering on a product in Canada somewhere, by extension will likely get additional opportunities delivering out of market in the European Union, China, or what have you.

So I think that's going to probably be the biggest area of benefit for these smaller and medium-sized companies. It's going to be working with larger globalized entities.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Pacetti, you have five of the best minutes the committee can offer.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you for that endorsement, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming forward

I have just a couple of quick questions.

Ms. Benczkowski, does your association actually do the research or is everything farmed out to the pharmaceuticals?

[Debbie Benczkowski]

We have a research competition every year that we run. Our research is primarily investigator driven, so our researchers come to us, provide us with an idea, make application, and we fund their research.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So who would you partner with? Would you partner with the pharmaceutical companies or with other—

[Debbie Benczkowski]

We partner primarily with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the new Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging, which is the latest project to really come forward to provide funds for dementia research.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So would the CETA agreement allow you to form any partnerships with anybody in Europe to pool your research dollars, or is that something that...?

[Debbie Benczkowski]

It's a possibility and it's certainly something we would have to look into. We do have very close relationships with international research funding bodies all over the world. Through the American Alzheimer's Association, we're part of an international funders group.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So the agreement wouldn't enhance any partnerships. Would it just make it maybe easier?

[Debbie Benczkowski]

I would hope it would make it easier. As we said, the devil is in the details, so we hope that it would make it easier for us.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you.

Ms. Wong, you talked about the lack of regulatory harmonization, but what qualifies or distinguishes an orphan drug category as opposed to the other categories?

[Dr. Durhane Wong-Rieger]

The EU and the U.S. have about the same definition of rare diseases, and that is orphan drugs. Orphan drugs are for diseases that affect very small patient populations, fewer than one in 2,000. They're also severe, life-threatening, or progressively debilitating. For these diseases there's typically no treatments, so the goal is to actually be able to stimulate research and development because the cost of the research and development is as high as it is for any common disease, but the return on the investment can be very low because the numbers are small.