If the Liberals cave to the NDP’s demands to create single-payer universal pharmacare in order to maintain the supply-and-confidence agreement, the already poor relationship between Canadian governments and the biopharmaceutical industry will be further damaged especially if only so-called “essential” drugs are covered, and not innovative emerging therapies.
Government hostility to the industry is demonstrated by the barriers that drug developers must overcome to get new medicines listed in government drug plans. This includes a lack of federal incentives to submit medicines to Health Canada, protracted health technology assessments (HTAs) that lack accountability and transparency, and slow collective price negotiations. Neither HTAs nor price negotiations provide for independent adjudication of differing views by arbitration or the courts. Even when drugs successfully pass these barriers, government drug plan gatekeepers make the situation worse by slow-walking drugs onto formularie