Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you all for coming today.
Ms. Nolet, in 1987, after the Patent Act was amended to increase protection for pharmaceutical drugs, Rx&D committed to increasing its members' annual expenditures on R and D to 10% of sales revenue by 1996. According to the 2011 report of the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, that ratio was at or above 10% between the mid-1990s and 2002. It was for maybe seven or eight years. Since then, it's fallen below 10%. It was at 6.7% in 2011.
The commitment made in 1987 was kept for a little while, but not on an ongoing basis. That's of concern, particularly when we talk about this proposal Ambassador Matthias Brinkmann talked about yesterday in Halifax. He made it very clear that for the EU, increasing patent protection from eight to 10 years is a big deal in the trade agreement being negotiated. We've heard about the costs. It would potentially cost provinces an added $2 billion per year. I don't know how much it would cost consumers across the country.
You talked about the $1.3 billion investment in R and D that it has grown to. That's important and valuable, and we want to encourage that. Of course, when you talk about $20 billion in R and D over that period, I assume that there was somewhere in excess of $200 billion in sales.
We were talking about the cost and how provinces can manage this increase in costs. You said that provinces have every tool at their disposal to manage them. Recently, in Nova Scotia, the NDP government cut spending on primary and secondary education by $200 million and made a similar cut to post-secondary education. Is that the kind of tool you're talking about that provinces have?