Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to your meeting. I am very happy to be here.
I also want to thank my students from McGill University, who gave me permission to be here today. Another professor is replacing me, and I'd like to thank him as well.
I have worked with human aid organizations, mostly in Asia and through the Doctors Without Borders organization. Memories of Africa still haunt me.
My team took over a project from the French military in 1994 in the dying gasps of the genocide in northwestern Rwanda. We walked into a very fine hospital with fine surgical units, with wards where the patients could be. There was one room where the doors were locked. I asked, “What is behind this door?” I was told those were people I could do nothing for and just to focus on the people I could help. I asked to look behind those doors, and what I saw basically were breathing skeletons. They were people who were dying from HIV/AIDS. At that time, while patients in Canada, Britain, the U.S., and many other developed countries in the world were able to receive life-saving HIV/AIDS treatment, those people did not have access.
I called my headquarters and asked if we could get some medicines for those people: “What we can do? We have to help them.” They said they were sorry, but it would cost $12,000 per patient, per year. They said: “These people have a chronic disease. We cannot help them.” So we had to sit every night and hold these people's hands. We had to comb their hair and talk to them because we were the last people who were to have any contact with them. We watched those patients die.
I believe it's important to bring that to you people here and to those who say we shouldn't make this an emotional issue. But this is about human lives. This is about people who are dying while people in our countries do not have to die. This is about a situation where people do not have access to essential medicines.
It's not the first time I have appeared before this parliamentary committee in the last seven years, which is how long I have been working on this issue. I first appeared in 2004 before this same committee, urging it to reform Canada's access to medicines regime as was then proposed, because there were fundamental flaws in it. The legislation was passed as it was, and we decided as Médecins Sans Frontières to try to test the legislation, because there was so much goodwill, both in the government, the Prime Minister's Office, and from all parties who voted in favour of the legislation and making this work.
So we decided to try to test it. After four years—four years—we managed to get one drug for a limited number of patients to one country. In those four years, about 40 million people died because they did not have access to essential medicines.
We're not saying that Canada is the solution to the whole crisis, but that Canada has a role to play. Canada is not a panacea, but it has an international commitment that it took in 2003 to try to make the August 30 decision work in Canada. We still have that commitment today. We can do it better, and we should do it better.
I worked with my colleagues inside of MSF, and Cailin Morrison in particular, as well as Richard Elliott from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, to try to make this order happen, with all the best intentions and goodwill. We went to many countries through our MSF teams, asking governments to please apply and to use that piece of legislation. When we approached the health ministries, they were all thrilled. They would say: “Wonderful, it's another way maybe we can get drugs for our people at last. We need every single mechanism we can find to treat our patients.” We were hopeful. Then when they went to their foreign affairs ministries or to their trade ministries, a block was put on it.
Why was that block put on it? The block was put on it because of the experiences of countries like Thailand, who tried to use flexibilities in their regimes to use compulsory licensing, as Richard Dearden was saying earlier, in domestic situations. When Thailand used a compulsory licence, sanctions immediately came down on them. Abbott, a pharmaceutical company, withdrew drugs and threatened to withdraw other drugs from the Thai market if they didn't change the way they were acting. The U.S. government put Thailand onto the 301 watchlist, as a partner who should not be trusted in matters of intellectual property.
The European Union trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, sent a letter to the Thai government, threatening them over their use of compulsory licenses and saying they should spend more time negotiating with pharmaceutical companies. They had in fact held over 20 meetings with pharmaceutical companies on this issue to try to get AIDS drugs for the dying Thai population.
Why is the law failing? Some people will refer to market failures, as my colleague on my right will say. Well, I would respectfully submit, the market failures are not an issue for parliamentarians around this table. What you have to do is to make a law that has all the best chances to win, which Bill C-393 has. The market issues are things that should be left to the pharmaceutical companies and the generic companies in trying to make it work.
I would say that references to other forms of fixed-dose combination, which are not same as the fixed-dose combination Apotex produces, will not give fair price comparisons.
Finally, I would like to raise something that has been of great concern to me and many of my colleagues. We've been hearing that there is a move afoot to kill Bill C-393. In the next session, when a vote has to be held on the new sponsor of this private member's bill, there will be people who will prevent it from passing. I would like to submit that this is not a way to democratically deal with the bill, and it would definitely undermine the extremely important work this honourable committee is doing. So I wanted to raise that to your attention, and I do sincerely hope, as a new Canadian citizen, who got her citizenship in March this year, that this is not what Canada would do to this bill.
As a final thing, when I came here to Canada with my family, I had promised the patients I had worked with for over 15 years in Africa and Asia that I would be able to do something here. I believe that Canada is a great country and we have a power to make change.
Thank you.