Thank you very much.
My name is Joel Lexchin. I teach health policy at York University, and I work at the University Health Network as an emergency physician.
I'm going to comment about the possible implications of the TPP on drug regulation and prices. There are five separate chapters or annexes that could potentially affect these areas.
The first one is the technical barriers to trade, which contains laws on transparency, regulatory harmonization, and acceptable marketing approval processes that could entrench the views of foreign governments. For instance, one of the articles in this chapter gives foreign governments the right to comment on Canadian regulatory approval standards. That doesn't mean they're going to change, but there's certainly the potential for that.
There is also no guarantee that, if standards are harmonized, they're going to be harmonized upwards rather than downwards. For instance, one of the articles gives Health Canada the right to retain secrecy around its reports on inspection of manufacturing facilities, rather than making those public.
The article on intellectual property has provisions around both data exclusivity and patent term extension. Those won't affect Canada too much, because we've already given away patent term extension with the CETA, and our data exclusivity currently meets the TPP standards. However, the TPP means that these are going to be locked in, because it requires the agreement of all of the signatories to change any of the provisions. If Canada at some point in the future wanted to roll back data exclusivity or roll back patent extension, we would need the agreement of all of the signatories of this agreement.
The chapter on transparency and anti-corruption could also have negative effects, potentially on drug costs. Currently, we don't have a national pharmacare plan. There's debate going on about that. If we do develop one, then this article could become effective and limit our abilities to control expenditures.
You've already heard briefly about the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. We have that already through NAFTA. That applies to U.S. companies. Eli Lilly is using it to challenge the court's revocation of patents on two of Eli Lilly's drugs. The TPP will open up the ISDS mechanism to Japanese companies.
Beyond these risks I've outlined, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is not happy with what it got out of the TPP. A U.S. diplomat at another forum was commenting on this and said that the U.S. industry did not get everything that it wanted, so there is also the strong potential that U.S. drug companies will try to push the limits of the TPP, and that could further affect how we regulate and price our medications.
Thanks very much.