International Trade committee  Yes.

International Trade committee  Yes, absolutely.

International Trade committee  Over the last 25 years.

International Trade committee  That is what will happen, because it will delay generics getting on the market. A number of different components of the TPP proposals cumulatively would have the effect of delaying generic copies, as it were, of products getting on the market, and generics are much cheaper than the patents.

International Trade committee  Do you mean beyond the 20 years in TRIPS?

International Trade committee  I don't know either, because I don't have a final text of the agreement to make any calculation about—

International Trade committee  Yes.

International Trade committee  It's that in total we would have a longer period of patent protection, given these various different elements that are being incorporated into that agreement.

International Trade committee  We extended patent protection up to 20 years. Then, with some other bells and whistles that the industry has managed to arrange, it's probably in the vicinity of 22 or 23, depending on the drug and so on. So we extended patent protection, which means it takes much longer for generics to get on the market.

International Trade committee  Take the U.K., for example, with NICE, which is their national purchasing agent. They're a unitary country, but they have the advantage that they're essentially bulk purchasing and negotiating with big pharma for the drugs that people are using. We're very fragmented in the way in which we deal with this.

International Trade committee  If you go back to the Hall commission, that's something that was recommended way back in 1964. Unfortunately, the federal government at the time and in the subsequent years did not get around to doing that. The federal government has to provide leadership on this issue. It's the one government that could provide the provinces with the support, and arguably with the competency, to do that effectively.

International Trade committee  Well, they've said that for the last 25 years. We gave them a huge extension on patent protection. We have a very good system of compulsory licensing, which was introduced in 1969 by legislation that didn't fall from the sky. There were four major commissions in the sixties that looked at drug prices in Canada.

International Trade committee  Yes. It's public financing of drugs. We're way behind Europe in that regard.

International Trade committee  Well, there is history. Again if you go back to the Hall commission, it advocated that. If you look at the National Forum on Health in the late nineties or at the Romanow commission, there have been many efforts to try to move us towards a more universal public approach. We are not—

International Trade committee  I certainly do.