As I mentioned, when Connaught was manufacturing drugs in Canada, they provided those drugs at cost to public and private insurers, and to consumers. Obviously they weren't paying dividends to shareholders, they weren't raking money off the top and so on and so forth, so they were able to do that. The pharmaceutical industry is not able to do that. They have an obligation to provide a return on investment to their shareholders and so on. I think that a public manufacturer would go a long way towards contributing to a better cost picture in Canada for drugs.
Compulsory licensing is a tool that Canada used to use and it was also something that we abandoned during the period when we were negotiating free trade deals and so on. These things have undermined our ability to not only have greater control over the prices that we pay for medicine and vaccines, but also our ability to supply drugs to Canadians if the industry is not able or willing to supply them. The industry right now is basically saying that they're not going to supply new drugs in Canada if the guidelines go through. We're not the only country that they've issued that warning to.
I think one of the ways to respond to that, to counter that, is to ensure that if they don't, if they choose not to supply drugs in Canada, we have the capacity to supply them ourselves.
We're looking at this now. There's been a big debate in Canada around the COVID vaccine, as another example. We're not making the COVID vaccine in Canada. We're relying on global manufacturers to supply that. It's not that they're saying that they refuse to supply us. It's that they're saying they'll get around to it after they have supplied these other markets that they have obligations to, or whatever. I think we need to figure out a strategy to deal with that.