Health committee  Those are some of the factors. I think part of it is also the capacity to bring pharmaceutical companies under control. They have huge profits. They are going to our doctors and talking to them about what drugs they should be carrying. They are providing conferences to doctors.

Health committee  I'm sorry, but I wasn't clear about the dollar-for-dollar part of that.

Health committee  Sorry, you're asking me to say how all these various unions would consider this idea. I can't honestly speak for them directly. The only thing I can say very clearly is that all the major unions in this country are in favour of moving to a full public national pharmacare program.

Health committee  The thing that immediately comes to my mind is simply the price Canada is paying under this system we have, which is extraordinarily high, versus the price in those countries that have a national public drug plan, which is, in general, lower in cost and provides better service to

Health committee  How about doctors and hospitals? We did both of those. There was a time in Canada when neither doctors nor hospitals were covered in the public sphere, and people paid out of their pockets for what was, I think, generally accepted as inferior care, compared with having a pooling

Health committee  I saw that comment. It made me smile, because in the Canadian Health Coalition, we have a huge amount of support from the union movement, and that includes all the big unions. I could list them off, but to save space, I won't. It's not just that the unions themselves are in fav

Health committee  I would prefer the latter. My remarks tended to say that these are the kinds of problems you're going to have if you try to integrate some kind of work-based model like the one in Quebec with the public system, which just picks up the outliers who aren't covered with a workplace

Health committee  What I said was that the majority of Canadians, probably in the region of 60% to 65%, have workplace coverage. The rest do not.

Health committee  I think that's a very good question. I think it's really important that we understand who we're talking to and whether there are conflicts of interest. I have no conflict of interest to disclose, and I am not waiting for a telephone call, either.

Health committee  I have all the time in the world. I'm sorry.

Health committee  Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today. I am primarily a researcher, and the author of four books and many, many articles focusing primarily on labour force issues. I worked for 10 years for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union. This is the union that h