Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My question is mainly for Mr. Skinner.
I won't hide the fact that it irritates me a little to hear the same thing again and again about protecting patents to encourage research and development in the pharmaceutical industry. For 25 years, I have been studying the economic impact and the importance of social programs, particularly in health, in relation to the gross domestic product of a country, of a government budget.
What I've been seeing for 25 years is also shown in the figures published by the OECD in 2007 for the G7 countries. I compiled these numbers, and a very clear curve is established between the control of government spending in health and the actual costs. We can see that the United States is the country that spends the most public funds, considerably more than any other G7 country, whereas in the United Kingdom, which exercises very tight control, has the lowest levels of public spending.
I will now come back to the pharmaceutical companies. The chair of socio-economic studies of the Université du Québec à Montréal published a study on the 15 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world—we are obviously not dealing with the Canadian context. This study indicates that, in general, research and development spending over a 10 or 15-year period, if I remember correctly, represents the equivalent of only about a third of marketing and administration costs.
In terms of research and development spending, I'm not saying it's a general rule, but I think that too often we unfortunately see the development of new products that are simply derivatives of existing products, products that have supposedly been improved. I'll be honest: I sometimes feel like I'm being had.
You're asking for alignment with the European rules, in the same way that we are having a speculative bubble on the stock markets. But doing this, are we not just creating a monster, a bottomless pit of money that, in the end, won't bring anything extra to my mother, for example, who has to take a collection of pills every day? In the end, what concrete outcome will this alignment bring to Canadians? Can you give us a clear answer?