Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It is a great pleasure to be here with you today to talk about this issue, which is very important for the biotechnology industry.
Thank you very much for the opportunity this morning to provide testimony on your study of CETA, the Canada-Europe free trade agreement.
At the outset, let me just introduce BIOTECanada. BIOTECanada is the national trade association that represents Canada's biotech industry. We have about 250 members across the country, and they are in the three primary biotech areas. These include health and life sciences together as one, and then the industrial and agricultural fields as well. I'll dive into my membership a little later in my opening remarks.
At the outset, let me just say that the industry is strongly supportive of the CETA. As you correctly pointed out, Mr. Chair, I did come from the forest products industry before. We recognize in BIOTECanada as well that this is an important step for Canada, which is an export nation. We depend on markets abroad. I don't want to take any of the wind out of my colleague Catherine Cobden's sails here, but we know that both growing markets and securing markets outside of this country are extremely important for this economy, and I'm sure she'll elaborate on that. It is also very important for our industry internally.
I'm going to talk a bit about the intellectual property aspects of this agreement, which are extremely important to our industry. Particularly important is the patent term restoration of two years for patents that are caught up in the system, and also the right of appeal.
I'm going to now give you a better sense of our membership to explain why this is so important. When you look at BIOTECanada's members, and particularly I'm talking about the health and medical area now, we have about 130 members that are small or medium-sized enterprises across the country. These are individuals who have essentially a good idea that they're trying to commercialize. The companies can range from one person working on a computer in a university lab right up to some that have 30, 40, 50, or up to 100 people working on large or complex molecules in the biologics sphere, and to commercializing and improving people's health.
I also have in my membership some of the large multi-national brand-name pharmaceutical companies that everybody is familiar with. The right question to be asking yourselves right now is why they would they be part of the association. To explain that, I have to explain what the new ecosystem looks like for Canada's pharmaceutical industry, and indeed, for the global pharmaceutical industry.
In Canada, what we have now is large brand-name companies that still have a significant presence here in Canada, but what they're looking to do is develop their pipeline. They're developing their pipeline, which is essentially where their next sets of drug products are coming from, by scanning across the country to try to find these small innovators who are in Canada and working on these novel molecules and trying to partner with them and invest in them to grow and commercialize those molecules. That's one of the reasons they're part of the BIOTECanada table.
Central to all of this, for all of them and particularly for the small members, is access to capital investment. To develop a drug is very expensive. There are estimates that it takes about a billion dollars to develop one, and it takes a lot of time—10 to 15 years. Even with that, it's still very risky. Investment dollars are paramount for the industry. Many of my small member companies spend the bulk of their time crossing this country and going to conferences around the world looking for investors.
Investment is a fickle kind of tourist. It's going to go to the countries in which it feels most welcome. If you don't put out a welcome mat and take care of such things as giving it free Wi-Fi, breakfast in the morning, a nice pillow, and all the rest of the things that other tourists look for, it's going to go to other jurisdictions.
One of the most important parts of welcoming capital into the country is intellectual property protection. That's why this deal is particularly important for my small members. In their quest to get investment capital, they need to be able to provide the assurance to investors that the intellectual property is protected and that it is secure here.
The provisions in this agreement signal to the investment community that Canada takes intellectual property protection very seriously, and also the rights of those property owners here. At the end of the day, when we look at many of the members in BIOTECanada what we're really talking about is good ideas. Unlike the case for my colleague here, Ms. Cobden, whose industry has trees, which cannot be moved from where they are and which you have to process where they are, in my industry you have good ideas that are on laptops. You can move them anywhere in the world.
So if the capital isn't coming to Canada, if we're not putting out the welcome mat and are not giving it the security that it needs, those ideas are going to go where capital is. Then we lose the innovation, and more importantly, particularly in this area, we lose the health care treatment that may be available to Canadian patients.
When we look at some of the innovations that are coming, particular in the orphan drug area for which the government is developing a national orphan drug strategy, we may lose out on some of that innovation. But we also may lose out on some of that health care. To grow the innovation here, to commercialize it here and also deliver health care advantages to Canadians is the reason that this deal is important to our industry. We strongly support it.
I look forward to entertaining any questions that members may have about my testimony.
Thank you very much.