On intellectual property, I have the same type of answer I provided on supply management. We just need more intelligent tools to deal with some of the issues, and we have access to those tools.
Governments in Canada have an overriding interest in making sure that when drugs are available they're available at a price that encourages drugs to be made available in the long run. That requires innovators and people to have good protection for their patents. It also makes sure that governments use their purchasing power to ensure that drugs needed for public health are available.
We also provide a number of R and D tax credits to people who perform research here. To me that means Canadians have a public interest in the results of that research to make sure research doesn't get held up and that it gets disseminated. So there is inevitably a trade-off between the two.
But I'm not quite sure, for example, that we are intervening in the market for patents the way we should. In other words, why does government not have a proprietary interest in these patents?
In short, like Don, I think we need to bring our standards to an international level. But there are other tools--whether it's intervening in the patent market or through competition policy--to make sure the product gets to the consumer at the appropriate price so there is no price-gouging.