What CETA will do is make drugs more expensive, which will make it more expensive to implement a pharmacare program. CETA itself doesn't restrict the introduction of a national pharmacare program—that's allowed—but it's clear that the single largest impact from CETA will be on prescription drugs. There's no clear benefit to Canada, because it only affects drug costs in Canada, not in the EU.
EU nations already regulate prices, so that's one other thing we could do. We could regulate drug prices. We could cap prices. We're told that nothing in CETA prevents us from doing this, but we have been shown no indication that the federal government intends to take any action on that front. Where we're talking about compensation, we should be talking about capping prices. We should be talking about insisting on R and D investment in Canada, which has fallen to 5% of sales when in the EU it's at 20% of sales in comparable countries such as France and Germany.