Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the committee for the invitation to appear.
I am the head of an organization that works for the human rights of people living with HIV and of communities particularly affected by HIV, both in Canada and internationally.
We are also a member of a larger coalition of organizations that are concerned about access to medicines. A copy of the submission that has been distributed to you, I believe, includes the names of a number of organizations that have shared those concerns with you.
Last, I should mention that I am a member of the expert advisory group to the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, which was mentioned by Professor Labonté before, although obviously I don't appear on behalf of that panel today.
We have a number of serious concerns with the TPP, and I want to focus on two aspects of the TPP in particular: the chapter on intellectual property, and the chapter on investment, both of which have already been mentioned. Our concerns are also about both the domestic impact and the international impact of this agreement, which has been quite properly characterized as TRIPS-plus, that is, exceeding the provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the World Trade Organization.
On the domestic front, the provisions in both the IP chapter and in the investment chapter will lock in, and in some cases make even more restrictive, the IP rules that already exist in Canada which will further delay access to lower cost medicines. Very importantly, as you've heard from the CNA and from Professor Labonté, this will chill regulatory innovation for public health, including in particular, the potential for expanding our public health insurance to include a national pharmacare program with some form of price regulation, something that has been recommended for decades in Canada by many different parties, and by many different commissions and studies, and yet hasn't moved forward.
The TPP will actually make that more difficult, and the longer we don't have a domestic pharmacare program and take advantage of our ability to regulate in the public interest, the longer we'll continue to have inequitable access to medicines in Canada.
If the impact on Canada and Canadians is important, it's even more significant for developing countries that aren't fortunate to have the same resources that a high-income country like Canada has. For countries in the global south, the TPP member states that are low- or middle-income countries will in fact have to adopt significant new restrictive measures related to intellectual property that will have a negative consequence on access to affordable medicines.
Given that the TPP has been presented as a template for future trade agreements, this can't be ignored. It's not simply the handful of low- and middle-income countries that will be most immediately affected by the TPP in this way, but it's also the pressure that will then arise on other countries similarly situated in the future in other trade negotiations. There has been no secret made of the fact that this is the plan for the TPP.
I want to remind us, as a matter of context, that 15 years ago all the member states of the WTO, including Canada, adopted a declaration that was aimed at preserving the flexibility that countries have in shaping their public policy in order to improve access to affordable medicines for all, including a number of measures that, in some cases, will be made more difficult by the TPP.
It's a bit strange that when you have a declaration that has been adopted by Canada and all the other WTO members, against the backdrop of a global AIDS crisis and millions of people dying of AIDS and of other illnesses in developing countries, where we say that we'll preserve the policy space and the flexibility that countries have, but then at the same time we negotiate other trade agreements that will chip away at that policy space and that ability to regulate in the public interest, that doesn't seem like acting in particularly good faith.
I should also note that Canada, of course, is a significant contributor of funds to global health initiatives, including through the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. In fact, Canada will be hosting the next replenishment conference of the Global Fund later this year. We should stop to think about the Canadian taxpayer dollars that are being contributed to such an important, health-financing mechanism that has saved millions and millions of lives around the world, but whose ability to save those lives will be impeded when the prices of medicines are actually kept unaffordable. If we're going to contribute money to try to save lives by making medicines affordable, let's not at the same time chill the ability of countries to actually control the prices of those medicines. In doing so, we limit the effectiveness of our foreign aid.
Specifically with respect to the two major areas of concern regarding access to medicines in the TPP, the first is the question of the provisions on intellectual property, in the intellectual property chapter of the TPP, and in particular—