Industry committee  To answer your question, the regime does what it can do. We do have a regime, the only one of the others in the world that has actually resulted in a shipment. The reason there haven't been more shipments is not because of the structure of our patent regime and CAMR; it's becau

Industry committee  Canada does do some outreach to make it clear what the regime does, and maybe Rob could expand on that a little. I think, though, when Canadian manufacturers face competition, when developing countries can get cheaper medicines from other countries such as China and India.... T

Industry committee  Other access to medicines regimes?

Industry committee  There are regimes that have different characteristics in Canada. Some of them are laxer or less specific in some areas, but none of those has actually resulted in a shipment of drugs under those regimes. I don't think the solution lies there, because if there was a solution, we w

Industry committee  I think my colleagues from CIDA would be the best people to talk about what the situation is like on the ground and in reality.

Industry committee  Thanks, Brigitte. In conclusion, CAMR addresses only one small part of the problem of global access to medicine, and that's to make generic versions or copies of patented medicines available under certain tight conditions, as I explained. The proposed changes will not resolve o

Industry committee  Thanks very much.

Industry committee  Thank you, Rob. I'm on to slide 5 now. I'll just back up for a second to say that Canada's patent system rewards the extensive investment that's needed to develop new, innovative products, including medicines, by giving patent holders exclusive rights to sell the results of the

Industry committee  With my colleagues, that's right.

Industry committee  Yes. We're going to try to keep within that timeframe.

Industry committee  I think everyone has a copy of our deck before them...? Fantastic. That's what we'll be going through. I'll start by thanking you for the invitation today to speak about Canada's access to medicines regime, or CAMR, as it's often called, and to speak about the possible implicati

Industry committee  I've noted that.

Industry committee  That's certainly an issue we've heard about and that we expect some stakeholders would bring forward. It was one of the issues on my list. It really is whether the security transfer provisions in the Canada Business Corporations Act should be removed because there are already pro

Industry committee  We don't conduct regular consultations in the sense of automatic consultations every two years or something like that. We have consulted on issues as they have come up. For example, there were consultations that followed the WorldCom and Enron issues. I gave an example of that in

Industry committee  We didn't come here today with any proposals for amendments. We really are here to provide information and background on the statute itself. As I mentioned before, we're certainly going to be watching the committee hearings and looking forward to the report of the committee in te