Mr. Speaker, this bill is very important to our party. We have indicated to the government that we do not intend to hold up this debate for much longer, and we appreciate the government's co-operation in this matter.
For us the bill and the issues that it raises with respect to trade agreements and drug pricing go to the heart of our objection to what has been going on in this country for the last 10 to 15 years. I guess it has been 14 years if we go back to 1987 when the first bill on changing the drug patent legislation in Canada first came before the House of Commons.
At that time it was a Progressive Conservative government under the leadership of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. A bill was introduced to reduce and transform the way in which we had constituted our drug patent and drug pricing policies in this country. Until that point, we had a policy which had been established some decades before whereby generic drug manufacturers could bring onto the market generic imitations of new brand name drugs after only two years.
This was one of the reasons why we had one of the most envied health care systems in the world, not just in terms of quality but also in terms of being able to keep costs down. We did not have to pay these exorbitant brand name costs or at least we did not have to pay them for very long. We only had to pay them for two years, then after that our health care system could begin to use and doctors could begin to prescribe these new generic replacements. Of course the brand name drugs were still available and could still be used.
In 1987 we understood, and we still understand, as a prelude to the free trade agreement negotiations between Canada and the United States, the Conservative government at that time, in a very strange form of negotiation, made a big concession before it even got to the table by giving into the Americans on this particular issue. It was not just to the Americans. There were a great many French multinational drug companies and others that were involved. We were very much against this at the time. We were against it again in 1992, when Bill C-91 was brought in. I believe the bill in 1987 was Bill C-22.
We were against it then and today we are against Bill S-17 which is part of a sequence of bills that have progressively eliminated the ability of Canada to have its own independent drug patent and drug pricing policy. The fact that we could not and cannot maintain a system that worked so well for Canada, which was the result of a political decision taken in this country many years ago, is for us transparently what is wrong with the free trade agreement. The fact is the rights, privileges and profits of multinational drug companies come first. The rights, the privileges and the health of Canadians insofar as their need for access to cheaper drugs and collectively in terms of their need for a health care system that is less costly rather than more costly comes second.
Property is put before the public interest in such a blatant way that even the Liberals when they were in opposition could see this. Or did they? We have spent a fair bit of time and appropriately so pointing out that the Liberals have changed their position.
However I maintain that at another level it is not so much that they changed their position, it was the fact that they were insincere in their opposition to Bill C-22 and Bill C-91 in the first place, in the same way they were insincere in their opposition to the free trade agreement, with the possible exception of their leader at the time in 1988, Mr. Turner, who I have come to the opinion was sincere in his opposition to the free trade agreement. At the same time, he led a party that was full of people, some of whom later became Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, who were not opposed to the free trade agreement.
I believe now that they were not genuinely opposed to Bill C-22 and Bill C-91 at the time because they knew, as we know, that the Liberal Party ultimately would do the bidding of the big business community. There are few businesses in this country and internationally that are bigger than the multinational drug companies.
It is not just that they do the bidding of these companies, the problem is now the bidding and the interests of these multinational drug companies is enshrined in international trade agreements, like the World Trade Organization. Now these interests can be advanced without there being a political decision or without anybody having to take responsibility for it. Nowadays, all the drug companies have to do is invoke the WTO and no governing political party takes any responsibility for it.
The Liberals get up and say they have to respect our international obligations and that they have to respect the trade agreements that they have signed, never mind that, at least with respect to NAFTA and the WTO, it was the Liberals who signed Canada on to the NAFTA and the WTO. Why did they sign these agreements if they were sincere in their opposition back in 1987 and 1992? Only they can answer that, and we look forward some day to an honest reckoning of just what happened along the road to corporate Damascus on the part of the Liberals.
For us, although the bill implements a certain ruling of the WTO and is a smaller ruling than the larger ruling in the first place, it is all part and parcel of a trend in international and regional trade agreements that gives priority to the interests and the profits of big business, in this case large drug companies, over the interests of the Canadian people and of people all around the world.
Look at the struggle that was fortunately just won in South Africa where the drug companies invoked their patent rights to prevent the distribution of medicines that treated the disease of AIDS.
While I am at it, I asked a question in the House not so long ago. It had to do with emerging therapies and treatments related to gene therapies. I asked the Minister of Health what the government would do.
There are many people in the medical community who are worried that the same thing that has been done with drugs by the kinds of things we are debating today will be done with these gene therapies, and that some time in the future any time we use a particular gene therapy we will have to pay a royalty to some big drug company that invented that gene therapy in the first place. This will become another burden on our health care system. It will become another argument for privatization, more private sector money and more user fees.
However I asked the question of the Minister of Health, and for me this was very symbolic, because I thought it was a health issue. I thought that distributing cures, therapies and medicines is something over which the Minister of Health ought to have some kind of ultimate authority. Who rose in his place to answer my question or should I say who rose in his place to not answer my question? It was the Minister of Industry.
I am not surprised that I did not get an answer. I suppose I should not have been surprised that it was the Minister of Industry who got up and said that it was a very interesting question, blah, blah, blah. The fact that the government sees this as an industrial question really had already answered my question.
This is a new territory. It is fine if the Liberals wanted to say that perhaps drugs are history and maybe it should be dealt with by the WTO, but there is a whole new area that they must stand fast on, and that is to not allow these new gene therapies to be taken over by the philosophy that they are private or corporate property and should be distributed on the basis of what is in the best interests of the profit margins of the companies involved. They could take a stand there if they did not want to go back and rewrite their own history. They are not even willing to do that. They see it as an industrial matter rather than a health matter.
For all these reasons, we feel it is unfortunate that there seems to be this consensus in the House, a consensus of which we are not a part, and that this is something that is beyond criticism. It reflects the political monoculture that has developed in the House of Commons among the Bloc, the Alliance, the Conservatives and the Liberals, all part of a seamless apology for corporate interests, with only the NDP standing here in our place saying that there has to be another way to look at drugs, at health.
Is there no other way of looking at drugs and health that will not put corporate interest first and people second? We believe there is. We think we had that before the Conservatives and then the Liberals moved to destroy the generic drug regime that we had in place. We feel that we can have that again if we had governments around the world that were willing to stand up to corporate interest, instead of engaging in these acts of self-inflicted powerlessness by which they give up the power that they once had as governments to act in the public interest.
The governments give up their power to trade agreements. Then when these trade agreements kick in years later and impose certain conditions on them, they do not know what to do as they are just living up to their international obligations. They may be international obligations now, but they were political choices at one time that governments made and that the people had at one point but they no longer have.
We want a government that works for the day when those kinds of political choices return to parliament and the Canadian people so they can decide what kind of generic drug regime they want rather than leaving it in the hands of trade bureaucrats at the WTO who are lunching constantly with the drug manufacturers and not lunching with the people whose health care system will be drastically affected by their decisions.