The amount spent on drugs in Canada--for you, as an individual Canadian citizen--is the second-highest in the world. The people in the United States spend I don't know how much. We spend roughly $900 per person in Canada on drugs of all kinds—not all prescription, not all patented.
Now, our mandate is to control the price of patented medicine during the 20 years that they are actually protected by patents. Once they go off patent, there's nothing that obliges the patented manufacturer to lower his price.
If he has generic competition, then he is going to lose market share. That's because in most provinces, in the provincial plans, there's mandatory substitution. It's not in all, but there's a lot of mandatory substitution. So if you're under one of the provincial drug plans and you go to your drugstore with your prescription and it says a brand name, the pharmacist is then authorized to give you the generic, which in most cases will cost less.
The only control we have, as the PMPRB, is over generics that have patents.