Health committee  Are they crucial?

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  I am Mr. Gagnon. Dr. Norman is....

Health committee  No, I wasn't part of the pharmacare panel.

Health committee  One example is Trintellix, which is an SSRI antidepressant. It came to the market and CADTH, at the time, basically did the evaluation. There was no clinical evidence that this new drug was bringing anything more as compared to existing drugs. The recommendation was to not pay a penny more for this drug than the lowest-priced drug of this category.

Health committee  Certainly having some help from the federal government to implement this would be something that would make things way easier, I think, for provinces. You say that health care is a provincial jurisdiction. I don't want to get into legal stuff, but constitutionally, health care establishments are of provincial jurisdiction.

Health committee  That's an excellent question. Basically, lack of access is a very important issue, and low-income workers are normally the most impacted by this. For racialized communities, in particular, based on surveys that were made looking at barriers to access, looking at issues of race, it was a big problem.

Health committee  Absolutely not.

Health committee  When it comes to implementing universal pharmacare, it doesn't have to be the federal government that does this. It can be done at the provincial level. It can be done through specific agencies that are being put in place for this through different types of social insurance systems.

Health committee  Thank you very much. My name is Marc‑André Gagnon, and I am a professor of public policy at Carleton University. I have been working on pharmaceutical policy issues for the past 20 years and have written more than 150 articles, chapters and technical reports on those same issues.