It's an irony, because the first thing President Trump did in office was to say that he hated the TPP and he was going to rip it up. However, what has happened is that a lot of the provisions that were originally in the TPP made themselves into the new NAFTA. One of those is the biologics.

Basically, we have patent protection in Canada for 20 years. However, on top of that, we have what's known as market exclusivity for biologics, which right now, in Canada, is eight years. The new NAFTA would raise it to 10 years. What's important for this is that already it's shown that about 70% of all the new costs to the Quebec assurance médicaments program are these costs of biologics. This is the highest rising class of drugs with all public plans put together. This is something where you can spend about $5,000 to $50,000 a year for a patient on this class of drug. These are very important treatments. This is something that will be offloaded either to private citizens who will have to choose whether they can afford these drugs or not, or in the event of a public plan, it will be offloaded to us.

It is a very important provision. It is basically U.S. pharma that benefits from this, because it is U.S. pharmaceutical companies that are the producers of these biologics. There's no interest for Canadians at all, in terms of industry or our public plans, to have this.

Currently in the United States, the Democrats are asking for these provisions to be specifically removed from the new NAFTA. As I've said before and I can go into more detail, they have the votes, and it's important to note that in 2006 when the Democrats gained majority in the House with George Bush as president, they actually opened up three agreements precisely for pharmaceuticals. They opened up the agreements with Colombia, Panama and Peru to specifically go in and change the pharmaceutical language.

I know industry feels that they are reassured by the signing of this new NAFTA, that this is a done deal, that this is going to provide assurance. However, the elephant in the room is that the United States has to ratify this agreement, too, and the votes aren't there unless this agreement is opened up.

What I'm saying is that this illusion of security, especially when we have this President of perpetual negotiation, is just an illusion. Ratifying this agreement in this speedy form is not going to provide insurance, because there's a critical path element here that we don't control, which is the U.S. Congress.

That illusion of security is just that; it's an illusion.

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