International Trade committee  I'm sorry, I am not following....

International Trade committee  A lot of the research is done in the U.S. and Canada, right? If the generic drugs are produced in India, are you suggesting that they're not subject to the patent protection that we have here?

International Trade committee  I don't know. That's not the way I understand it and that's not what the concerns have been of the experts I've consulted, so I'm not sure how to answer that question. I know that there are people looking into this who are very concerned about the patent protection.

International Trade committee  Sure. Could I just ask you to clarify the first question because they sounded sort of the same to me?

International Trade committee  To the extent that you would think that or you would agree that everything that has happened under NAFTA has been a positive thing.... It hasn't necessarily been a net gain to Canada in NAFTA. In terms of it leveraging, my question would be: would it leverage it in a positive way or leverage it in a negative way?

International Trade committee  I'm in favour of doing trade and increasing opportunities for local producers, but I'm also in favour of protecting Canadian and Manitoban sovereignty. I'm in favour of making sure that we develop our country and our economy in a way that Canadians want and that does not just benefit the rights of corporations to extract some sort of economic rent.

International Trade committee  Probably both. I'm not an expert on patents, but some of the research and reading I've done would indicate that there are better ways of doing them and that they probably need to be updated and modernized. Some proposals have come out in terms of how you could change the patent system so that you would make it actually work better for consumers.

International Trade committee  It's a question I have. I'd like to know if it does or not. It's an ongoing theme in Canada and has been over roughly the last 20 years.

International Trade committee  I'd be surprised if that were the case. This is all about harmonizing regulations, and when we talk about harmonizing, our experience is that we tend to harmonize down, we don't harmonize up. Our food safety has greatly deteriorated in Canada recently because of cuts to the public sector.

International Trade committee  I shouldn't have conflated Manitoba Hydro with water as a commodity. The commodification of water in Canada is something that we have been worried about for a long time. Once we start exporting water as a commodity to the United States, which is something that has been proposed and fought against, we worry that we will lose control of it.

International Trade committee  I'm not sure I understand the question.

International Trade committee  Without being able to know all the nuances of the TPP, and to the extent that you have a very powerful private health care sector in the United States that I think would be very keen on getting into the Canadian health care industry, for lack of a better word, this would be something that I would be very concerned about.

International Trade committee  Well, how would you enforce national pharmacare? That then becomes an expense of the government, right? If the government is going to be implementing a national pharmacare program, that means it's going to be helping Canadians with their prescriptions. If the patents are on longer and the drugs become much more expensive, that becomes a burden to the government.

International Trade committee  I haven't personally, but I believe probably my colleagues in Ottawa who do most of the research have looked at it. I haven't personally done that, no.

International Trade committee  Sure. We have a national office, and the trade research is actually done in our national office in Ottawa. I believe that study has probably already been done and, if not, I'm sure they'd be doing it. They have done extensive research on trade agreements, so I'd be surprised if they don't have that information.