Yes, thank you.
The data that we present in our brief come from the government agency, the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board. Those are not our data; they're data that it reports every year. I think we had provided to the clerk this morning a chart that basically shows that subsequent to Bill C-22 and Bill C-91, going back 20 years and then 15 years, the commitment of 10% in R and D--the research companies' commitment--has fallen below that for several years now.
So I guess our message to the committee would be to be very careful about buying that argument. It doesn't seem to have applied in Canada. We have seen, over the years, consecutive increases in patent protection through regulations, data protection, etc., yet the R and D numbers are not there.
One of the other messages I want to get to the committee today is that when we're looking at science and technology, Canada has a very strong generic drug industry. We should be proud of that. We have 10,000 or 11,000 jobs, many of them in manufacturing, many of those in the manufacturing sectors and areas that are being hard hit now with the Canadian dollar and losing jobs, which is one of the reasons we're concerned about the changes. But we're spending money on research and development. We're developing our products in Canada. Fifteen percent of our sales is going back into research and development for new products. They're being exported.
So when we develop intellectual property policy, we need to have a balance in Canada, and that balance has to be in terms of protection versus competition. We're arguing that the competition from generics is very valuable to Canada as well.