Good morning to you all. Hopefully you can hear me. I would like to thank the chair and honourable members for inviting the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association to appear before the committee today.
In addition to my elected role as chair of the CGPA, I am the chief commercial officer and executive vice-president of Apotex, a Canadian-owned multinational pharmaceutical company and Canada's largest manufacturer of medicines.
CGPA president Jim Keon and I are pleased to have the opportunity to share our industry's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight some of the ways that Canada can do more to ensure a sustainable and more resilient supply of prescription medicines for Canadians, moving forward.
Generic pharmaceutical companies are Canada's primary medicine manufacturers and exporters. CGPA member companies operate the largest life sciences companies and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in Ontario and Quebec. The industry directly employs more than 11,000 Canadians in highly skilled research, development and manufacturing positions. In addition to producing medicines for the Canadian market, made-in-Canada generic medicines are exported to more than 100 countries around the globe.
Our industry also plays a significant role in supporting Canada's health care system. Generic medicines are dispensed to fill 73% of all prescriptions in Canada but account for 19% of the $31 billion spent annually on prescription drugs. Up to 10 generic prescriptions can be filled for the cost of one brand-name prescription today.
From the outset of the pandemic, CGPA member companies have worked to provide support to our front-line workers. This has included donations of personal protective equipment and hand sanitizers, as well as financial supports for hospitals.
The industry has also provided support for potential COVID-19 treatments that are generic medicines. This has included two primary areas of focus. First, our industry has worked to secure a supply of generic medicines for these products to meet existing patient needs to ensure the continuity of their care. Second, our industry has donated tens of millions of tablets for use in Canadian and international clinical trials, and has expressed a willingness to retool our facilities and ramp up production for such products if they are found to be effective COVID treatments.
Our industry has also worked with governments, public health authorities, hospitals and international partners to help develop lists of essential drugs that are needed now and those that are needed for stockpiling in the event of subsequent pandemic waves. However, perhaps the most significant contribution by the generic pharmaceutical industry to Canada's COVID-19 response has been to provide Canadians with the medicines they need every day and to work to meet the new demands for hospital products and other products required to treat patients with COVID-19.
The pandemic has created unprecedented challenges and uncertainty for global supply chains in all industries, with border closures and export restrictions imposed by some countries and significant reductions in global shipping capacity. The pharmaceutical industry was not immune to these challenges.
Consider for a moment the sheer number of medicines we are dealing with. Generic pharmaceutical companies supply the Canadian market with hundreds of different medicines in thousands of different dosage forms. These products are used to fill three out of every four prescriptions. While many of these medicines are made in Canada, the industry is fully globalized. Finished products, manufacturing inputs and active pharmaceutical ingredients are also sourced internationally.
The CGPA is extremely proud of the dedication and hard work of generic industry employees to keep medicines in production in our manufacturing facilities and to keep medicines moving through the supply chain. They continue to provide an essential service for Canadians every single day, and we thank them. We would also like to recognize the important work of Health Canada and the trade commissioner service in helping our members address supply chain connectivity challenges, as well as the work of several provinces, distributors and pharmacists to help us ensure equitable access to the supply of medicines in a time of global supply chain upheaval.
The movement of all products internationally, including medicines, is much slower and more difficult that it used to be, and it is much more costly. While the situation has stabilized considerably, our industry is monitoring developments around the world on an ongoing basis to identify potential supply chain risks.
I will now turn the floor over to Jim Keon to provide our industry's recommendations from the lessons learned from COVID-19.
Thank you.