Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Manicouagan.
I am pleased to speak in this important debate tonight. I thank my colleague, the member for Vancouver East, for introducing the motion.
Why are we here tonight? We are here as a result of a very serious situation that has resulted from a large manufacturer and supplier of drugs in this country that has come up short and is unable to meet the demand for drugs. There is no question that this is a crisis situation but it is not new. It has been ongoing for at least five years and the government has been well aware of that.
In fact, the Minister of Health finally responded to pressure from organizations in the health care sector, the provinces and the opposition in August 2011 and began working with the industry and associations across the country to come up with a solution. What solution did she come up with? She came up with a voluntary monitoring system whereby companies, like Sandoz, were supposed to voluntarily indicate what their status was in terms of its ability to supply drugs to health authorities and hospitals across the country.
We need to ask how that is working so far. The problem is that it is not working. We are not just talking about there being a bit of a delay here. We are talking about this affecting tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are receiving or are about to receive elective surgery and will not get the kind of injectable drugs they need. We are talking about people receiving cancer treatments or treatment for epilepsy, and transgenders who are receiving treatment and injecting various drugs in order to ensure their progress is insured. Those are the people being affected as a result of this decision.
Who is Sandoz and what does it do? Sandoz supplies 90% of injectable drugs to hospitals from one end of the country to the other. It is no little corner store type drugstore. It is a significant company that is providing medicines, drugs and pharmaceuticals to provinces from one end of the country to the other. The government says that it cannot step in and use too strong a position with respect to the company because it is a provincial jurisdiction and it would be stepping on its toes.
The government already has an important role to play with respect to drugs in terms of registering, reviewing, monitoring and ensuring they are safe, although it is having some trouble with its ability to do that. However, it has been asked by many provinces and Canadian associations that represent anesthetists and pharmacists, as well as the Canadian Cancer Society to step forward and deal with the problem by putting some teeth into its ability to monitor the supply of drugs to the provinces and hospitals across the country.
The United States is doing that. Last year, the President of the United States recognized that there was a serious problem with drug shortages in the U.S. The pharmaceutical companies were unable to meet the demand for drugs and were not letting health authorities and hospitals know the situation and what their ability was in terms of meeting the demand or what the supply would be.
The government has said the companies will tell us whether they are able to supply the drugs, what drugs they will be able to supply, and they will voluntarily declare when they are having some trouble. In this case, Sandoz was advised in November of 2011 by the FDA in the U.S. that there were real problems with some of their facilities and that their production was going to be interrupted if it did not bring some of them up to standard. One of them was the plant that had production interrupted in Quebec.
Did the government hear about that? There was not a word. Did Canadians hear about that? There was not a peep. It was not until late February of this year that we began to get an indication that, in fact, there was going to be an interruption to the supply of drugs to hospitals and jurisdictions across this country. Clearly, the government's own strategy of asking the pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily, pretty please, make that information available has not worked. What this resolution says and what my colleagues on this side have said, one after the other in an incredibly articulate fashion, is that the government has to step forward and take some responsibility. It has to recognize that the strategy it put in place is not working and that Canadians' safety and health are at risk as a result of its failure to act.
The point is simply this. It should work with the provinces and health jurisdictions across the country and come up with one national system to monitor the supply of drugs across the country. It is that simple. It is not complicated. We are not talking about it coming in with a heavy hand, as it is doing in the Air Canada dispute, and taking the side of the employer and putting the jackboot down on working people. We are not asking it to move with that type of aggressive action. We are asking it to recognize that it is a partner in health care. The federal government and the provinces have a joint constitutional responsibility to ensure Canadians receive a certain quality of health care in this country. The government continually wants to abdicate that responsibility, and that is a problem for New Democrats.
In this debate, we are simply pointing out the flaws to the voluntary system. “Pretty please, big Sandoz, tell us what is going on and we will be okay” is not working. The government has to start putting some teeth to these issues and begin to deal with this question once and for all. It is not going to work otherwise, and that is the issue. If we do not deal with it, Canadians' health, comfort and ability to receive the treatment they need when they need it is jeopardized. Surely the government recognizes that is a situation that needs to be avoided.
Members on this side are telling the government to work with the provinces, recognize their jurisdiction and its own jurisdiction, take some responsibility and action to ensure this kind of situation does not happen again and the Canadians, because of their health circumstances, who need safe pharmaceuticals will receive them when they need them without going through these kinds of delays.
I am thankful we were able to proceed with this important emergency debate at this particular point in time.
