Mr. Speaker, please take note of the member on the other side of the House who is speaking and allow him to get up during questions and comments. I will deal with that when the debate is over.
The truth is that, excluding exchange rates, drug prices in Canada are cheaper and for a number of reasons. One is the strengthening of the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board Canada. The other, which I think even the legal minds on the government side of the House would recognize, is that in Canada litigation does not play as big a part in the overall cost of a drug as in the United States.
Our legislation worked in the past and it is working today. The result is that we have lower drug prices than many industrialized countries.
I will go through Tuesday's debate to point out what my NDP colleague next to me, the member for Winnipeg North Centre, had to say. On page 4651 of June 5, 2001 Hansard she said:
Mr. Speaker, the question about the profitability of brand name drug companies is a very important one because members of the four parties who support Bill S-17 feel that the excessive profits of these drug companies should be allowed to become even more exorbitant. Profits for brand name drug companies are already triple the industrial average and this industry is probably the second, if not the first, fastest growing industry in Canada.
The member went on to talk about high drug prices in Canada. However facts point to something different. We do not have the highest drug prices in the world in Canada. If we compare drug prices in Canada to drug prices in other industrial nations, we are at the lower end of the scale and not the higher end.
The bill we passed is working and the current bill will work because we must provide intellectual protection for this type of research to happen.
For example, a new drug called Gleevec was just approved in the United States. I am not sure how long it will be before it is approved in Canada. It is a new cancer fighting drug that was brought to market at a huge cost. It cost hundreds of million of dollars in research to bring the drug on line. It is being used to cure some forms of leukemia.
In strictly layman's terms, Gleevec attaches itself only to cancer cells. It does not destroy good cells as does a lot of chemotherapy, hence the significant side effects of being treated for cancer. Not only are patients cured but they do not have the extreme nausea and sickness that comes with normal chemotherapy treatment. That is a huge advancement and it saves lives. The question is, would the drug be on the market today if the company, Norvartis, had not been given patent protection? The simple answer is no. We would not have the drug.
Another drug, Retuxin, was brought in by another huge international drug company. The company spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the drug, which helps those who suffer from non-Hodgkins lymphoma and other cancers. That is a huge cost.
Hoffmann-La Roche brought that drug online and waited for months for it to be approved in Canada. Again, it saves countless lives and frees up our health care system because it means that we can take a drug at home and be cured outside of the hospital. That is a net saving to the system. The truth is that we will either use that drug or something else that has been around for a few years but has not proven to be as effective. Obviously this is like anything else, supply and demand, but the truth is that this type of research will dry up unless these companies have the protection they deserve. That is what the bill would do.
That is why the industry minister has had to swallow his own words on the bill. I want to quote the industry minister. This is the quote that usually sets the members on the government side ballistic. This is what they call an about turn, an about face, a complete reversal of position.
Why did it occur? One of the reasons was of course that the Liberal Party went from opposition to government. It is sort of like a lynching in the morning: it kind of focuses the mind. Once in government the Liberals then say there are certain realities they have to deal with when they are in government. One is that they just simply cannot hide from the truth. When something is working they have to embrace it even if they have to do a complete flip-flop on it. Obviously the GST was one of those realities. Of course they are trying to do a complete about face on the helicopter deal and so on and so forth. We could rage on forever on this one.
The fact is that the minister changed his mind. Why? Because he was wrong. This is what the Minister of Industry, the former premier of Newfoundland, often referred to as Mini-Me, had to say about the bill a few years ago. If only I were a good mimic. I can see the hands waving now. He said:
It is inconceivable to me that Parliament finds it necessary yet again to deal with yet another measure proposed by the Government because it is bound and chained to some ideological dictate which says this kind of Patent Act is necessary.
He went on to say that we would be taking money out of the pockets of old age pensioners and so on and so forth, that we were basically robbing the people blind by giving the patent protection act some thought here in the House of Commons. The idea was that it would pass at a huge cost to the Canadian public. He has eaten those words because we have the pharmaceutical jobs in Montreal, Toronto and other parts of Canada to prove that we were right and he was wrong.
I will give the minister some credit. He did stand up in Geneva not too long ago at a World Trade Organization meeting and say that Prime Minister Mulroney was right in terms of the free trade agreement at the time. He basically said that he railed as a member of the Liberal Party but time has proven that Mulroney was right, the Conservative Party was right, that free trade does work.
We have to give him credit for that. That is much more than just about every member sitting on the government side today would do. They railed against it. The fact is that the Canadian economy has expanded dramatically because of that free trade agreement, not to mention the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Now we have a bill that would do the same thing, which the government of course now embraces, with the exception of some of the members now in the House.
This is Liberal logic at its worst. I have taken the time to identify some of those members who have actually stood up in their places in the House and railed against this bill. They have actually railed against the very bill that the minister has now on the floor of the House, Bill S-17.
The member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge railed against the bill the other day in the House, as did the members for Toronto—Danforth and Eglinton—Lawrence, but guess what? When push comes to shove and it comes down to the final vote, every one of those members will be standing like lame ducks, voting in support of the very bill they railed against in the House. It almost reminds me of the free trade debate.
The member the other day said that we Conservatives air our dirty laundry in public. That is true. We do air our dirty laundry. The difference is that those people wear their dirty laundry year after year.