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Shortly after COVID-19 vaccines became available in late 2020, there was intense criticism of the federal government because of perceived delays in getting those vaccines into the arms of Canadians. This anxiety helped spark the discussion about what Canada should do to ensure access to necessary medicines and vaccines in the future, especially when the next pandemic is upon us.
To help answer that question, back in March 2026, Health Minister Marjorie Michel announced the creation of the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force to “explore innovative, made-in-Canada solutions that enhance competitiveness, and long-term growth to support reliable and sustainable access to pharmaceutical products in Canada.”
But the task force was not a balanced body. Martin LeBlanc, one of two co-chairs, was the co-founder and vice-chairman of CellCarta Biosciences Inc., a global contract research organization headquartered in Montreal that provides a variety of services to pharmaceutical companies to help them get their products approved for marketing. Out of the other 26 members, 23 were directly connected with the pharmaceutical industry—including the president of Innovative Medicines Canada (IMC), the Canadian lobbying arm for Big Pharma.
Where were the medical researchers who do the laboratory research and test new drugs, the patients who are the ones who need the drugs, the academics who study the pharmaceutical industry, the workers who do the work of making the drugs? None of them were on the task force.
Although the final report, released towards the end of July, contains some important information and reasonable recommendations, much of its content reflects the overwhelming industry bias in the task force membership, both in what is included and what is left out.
An industry wishlist
The report recommends that Canada should “address structural barriers faced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and not-for-profit organizations developing made-in-Canada advanced therapies.” But the task force did not consider the possibility of public ownership of drug manufacturing facilities, as already occurs in Sweden to a limited extent.
There is some discussion about economics but, perhaps not surprisingly, there is no mention that Canadian brand-name prices are the 5th highest among 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Despite these high prices, the report sees it as a problem that Canada has “focused on cost containment” and claims that this priority “may impact the launch of new medicine.” This is a claim that the drug industry makes whenever government talks about taking action on issues that the industry opposes, or does not adopt initiatives that industry is pushing. A few years ago, when Ontario was on the cusp of making drug companies disclose their payments to doctors, the IMC voiced the same threat of not introducing new drugs into the Canadian market.
The task force wants immediate access to new medicines once they have been assessed for safety and efficacy by Health Canada, presumably on the grounds that they will better the lives of Canadians. In making this recommendation the task force is knowingly distorting what it means when Health Canada approves a new drug. “Approval” simply means that the drug provides some health benefits and is safe enough to be used. Approval does not mean that the new drug is superior or even as good as products already on the market, nor does it mean that the new drug is safer than existing products—and it does not mean that the new drug provides value for money.
Comparing the benefits and safety of new drugs to existing ones and making recommendations about value for money is the job of Canada’s Drug Agency (CDA). Most of the time, when CDA recommends that provinces and territories should fund a new drug, it bases that recommendation on a price reduction, as do similar organizations in many other countries. The Task Force report wants the CDA to stop the practice of publicly publishing its price reduction
recommendations, leaving the public in the dark about the true value of new drugs.
Annual reports from the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), the federal organization whose mandate is to keep the price of patented medicines from being excessive, have documented the decline in the proportion of revenue that companies are spending on research and development (R&D)—from a high of nearly 12 per cent in 1995 to 3.7 per cent in 2023.
Industry complains that these figures are misleading because the PMPRB is using an out-dated definition of what constitutes research spending. IMC wants the PMPRB to use a definition of R&D “that includes activities in the social sciences and humanities, including donations and grants given to organizations that support community programs, education and environmental activism, as well as research in the social sciences, such as bioethics.”
Though supportive of research in other ways, these activities do not fulfill the original objectives of the agreement between the federal government and IMC to create research jobs, advance science and grow the Canadian pharmaceutical R&D industry. The task force report backs up industry’s claims with a call for the federal government to “moderniz[e] and migrat[e] the current reporting requirements regarding R&D, which reference an outdated 1987 definition.”
The report frequently uses the terms “innovation” and “innovative.” Industry frequently uses the term to mean drugs that use a new mechanism of action, drugs that are new dosage forms, drugs that are made using new manufacturing technology. But if you ask patients and clinicians, innovation means drugs that either prolong meaningful life or that improve the quality of life. By that definition only 10-15 per cent of new medicines are truly innovative—a major therapeutic advance over existing drugs. Without defining innovation the task force report leaves the impression that every new drug is potentially life-saving.
Innovation comes up again, when the task force, seemingly approvingly, cites a 2026 report from the United States Trade Representative that claims that Canada undervalues innovative medicines. The rationale is that Canada does not consider prices in the U.S. and Switzerland, countries that have the highest and third highest brand name drug prices in the world.
When it comes to covering the cost of drugs for the Canadian population, the report correctly notes that “100 public drug plans and approximately 100,000 private plans, [result] in uneven coverage, administrative complexity and incomplete alignment across decision-makers”. But it does not make the jump to recommending a national universal first-dollar pharmacare plan. Perhaps unsurprisingly, because this is not an option that industry supports.
Watch out for what’s coming
Consider the overlap between parts of the report and a recent article co-authored by the IMC president. Both praise Australia for taking a number of industry friendly actions, both point out that because of lack of action Canada is less attractive as a “first-launch market”, i.e., a country where new drugs are marketed early in their life cycle. Neither point out that Australia is also not a first-launch market.
At this point, we should be watching closely the degree to which Mark Carney’s government adopts the recommendations of an industry-friendly task force to the benefit of drug companies and the detriment to Canadians.
