That's a really good question. As I said, that's what patient groups were threatening to do in the U.K. and Switzerland, and that's kind of what brought Vertex back to the table. That's my understanding.
There are a number of provisions in our Patent Act that allow for compulsory licensing. One—section 65 and section 66—refers to the kind of situation you just described, when the patentee refuses to provide the product on reasonable terms, but there's a much more open-ended provision, section 19 in the act, that allows the government to override a patent for public, non-commercial use or in emergent circumstances.
All of these provisions.... As you probably know, Mr. Davies, Canada used to have a compulsory licensing system in effect that allowed generics to produce patented drugs at any point in the lifetime of the patent, but in the early 1990s and mid-1990s we entered NAFTA and we entered the WTO TRIPS agreement, and those agreements have a lot of standards and restrictions on the degree to which countries can avail themselves of those provisions, so our provisions reflect the language, track the language in NAFTA and TRIPS.
However, it's not an impossibility. When I go abroad and meet with my counterparts, a lot of countries are saying they lack the tools to deal adequately with the types of prices they're seeing and they need to explore this option of compulsory licensing more and see whether they need to make changes to their legal regimes and whether they need to amend the multilateral agreements they've entered into. They're saying, “Have we gotten to a point where we're in the same position that developing countries were 20 years ago with drugs for tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria, where we just can't afford the market price?”
I think developed countries increasingly find themselves in that same situation, so now there's an openness to talking about compulsory licensing more broadly.