Mr. Speaker, I wish the story of the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay about someone showing up with an envelope full of cash was unusual in this business. I was shocked to hear from experts in the Therapeutics Initiative, and this is a stunning statistic, that for every doctor in Canada, there are three drug salesmen. There are conferences. A seminar on a new drug happens to be held in Hawaii.
In his book, the hon. member for Oakville tells a story that I found at page 253. In referring to his time as a member of the provincial legislature in Ontario, he writes:
The Big Pharma lobbyists are nice people. They have a job to do. And in most cases it includes spreading around a lot of money. They do it subtly. There is no quid pro quo. “Hey, if I buy you dinner...will you speak up to help get our drug approved...?” But before you finish the last bit of your beef tenderloin, you will have heard the marvellous story of how their drug keeps patients out of the hospital and saves the taxpayers hundreds of millions.
There is the pressure from the pharmaceutical lobby and the quite inappropriate distribution of gifts. As the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay said, the fact is that there is a litany. I did not mention Abbott, which blocked 23 states from obtaining a cheaper alternative to their cholesterol drug. They were fined $22.5 million in 2010 for blocking jurisdictions in the U.S. from accessing a cheaper version of the drug that works just as well.
Let us pull back the blinds on the pharmaceutical industry, which spends more money to find a cure for baldness than it does to deal with malaria. Let us look at the profit motive, which is insidious, and find more ways to get generics out there. Let us look very closely at trade agreements like CETA and the trans-Pacific trade partnership and see what that is doing to advance the profits of pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the people they are supposed to be curing.