Thanks, Brigitte.
In conclusion, CAMR addresses only one small part of the problem of global access to medicine, and that's to make generic versions or copies of patented medicines available under certain tight conditions, as I explained.
The proposed changes will not resolve other global problems associated with access to drugs. These include the delivery of health care and disease prevention in developing countries. Without solutions to these other key problems, it is possible that the health-related problems of many countries will not be resolved.
For these same reasons, it's unlikely to result in more countries demanding to use CAMR. There are already many publicly available mechanisms to procure low-cost off-patent drugs to treat public health diseases in the developing world, and it's unlikely that developing countries will use CAMR when less expensive sources of generic medicines exist.
Changing CAMR won't lower drug supply and labour costs in Canada, and it can't, by itself, make medicines manufactured here more competitive with those made in, say, India or China. This has been acknowledged by the CGPA, the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association, during the CAMR review. Some of the witnesses, from whom you may be hearing and who appeared before the Senate committee on Bill S-232, also pointed that out.
Canada has the only access to medicines regime in the world that works.
In the case of Rwanda and Apotex, this objective was reached because of the regime which made it possible to ship over 14 million doses of an AIDS-fighting drug to Africa. For now, we are concerned that the proposed changes could adversely affect the way in which CAMR works, without providing sufficient performance guarantees and in the process weakening Canada's patented medicines regime and making our investment climate less attractive.
I'll end there.
I'll simply point out a couple of things. There is an annex to the deck presentation we gave you that, hopefully, gives you some useful background on CAMR, and there's a chart that explains how it works, on slide 10, the process, which I hope is simple.
We've also provided the committee with a copy of the timeline of the events that led up to the shipment of medicines to Rwanda, which I hope you all have. It's a fairly long piece of paper. It shows you in black the different events that happened on the timeline and in red the parts that relate to the access to medicines regime itself.
With that, we'd be very happy to answer your questions.