Mr. Speaker, I am on my feet tonight to question the response I received to a question I put to the Minister of Health on October 23. The question had to do with the minister approving the use of the drug Cipro. When he did that he broke Canadian drug patent law, and that is not a good thing to do. The drug patent law protects the ability of drug companies to research and develop drugs and it was wrong for him to do that.
One of the points I want to make in this presentation is the very ad hoc approach that the government has taken to terrorism. It is indicative of the Prime Minister's laissez-faire approach to government.
One of the disappointments for me and I think many other Canadians was when the Prime Minister formed his war cabinet and left out the Minister of Health. Given the abilities of the health minister, his intellect would surpass most of his fellow cabinet ministers. I am not questioning his ability, but the fact that the Prime Minister left him out of that war cabinet left a lot of us shaking our heads in wonder. It was a case of the minister attempting to play catch-up on terrorism without being fully consulted by the Prime Minister or indeed his cabinet colleagues on the approach that he should take in terms of coming up with a drug to combat anthrax.
It is a bigger problem than the fact that he did order the drug and he did break patent law. There is not much research going on in the antibiotic field. It is not a lucrative field in health science and drug companies recognize that. When we break a patent protection law we are discouraging companies from investing in research. They have to be protected and that is the bigger problem when a minister knowingly does that because he did have alternatives.
There are a number of drugs in addition to Cipro that could have been used that were not or were not ordered by the Government of Canada. Hopefully they will never have to be used. He could have applied to have the patent protection law lifted if indeed it was an emergency. He did not do that either.