WhatWouldBantingAndBest(AndMacleodAndCollip)
DoVille
In addition to our economy, we here in Canada might want to consider utilizing Trumpian fear mongering as a lever to help us diversify all kinds of things.
Including our prescription drug supply.
Heckfire, we could start with insulin which, in case you missed it, we actually discovered.
Colleen Fuller, writing at for the CCPA explains why - the following is her lede:
Insulin was discovered by four Canadians, who famously sold the patent for $1 each to the University of Toronto—enabling the public manufacture of the new miracle drug for people with diabetes. That was in 1921, and for 65 years insulin was produced in Canada at a publicly owned laboratory—Connaught Laboratories—and distributed across the country at prices near the cost of production.
In 1972, the University of Toronto sold Connaught to the federal government. By the 1980s it had grown to become a major supplier of medicines and vaccines, and Canadians had one of the lowest overall drug bills among developed nations. That all changed when the Conservatives were elected in 1984.
In his first budget speech, Michael Wilson, the new finance minister, announced that “Crown Corporations with a commercial value but no ongoing public policy purpose will be sold.” That included Connaught, which was privatized a year later and bought by what is now Sanofi, based in Paris. Ten years later, Canada was no longer producing a single drop of insulin...
And why can't we just fall back on the three multinationals that have pretty much cornered the insulin market?
For all the usual reasons of purely profit-driven capriciousness.
Here's just one example from Ms. Fuller's piece:
For all the usual reasons of purely profit-driven capriciousness.
Here's just one example from Ms. Fuller's piece:
...Canada, where about 640,000 people rely on insulin, is also vulnerable to corporate decision-making and the lack of a more interventionist national regulator. Between 1995 and 2006, Novo and Lilly withdrew over 30 different types of insulin from Canada, most of them from animal sources. In 2003, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health conducted two days of hearings on the issue after hundreds of people from across the country demanded the government intervene. Alarmed officials at Health Canada acknowledged that a subset of people with diabetes were unable to safely use any kind of human or analogue insulin and must have access to animal-sourced products. Some among these experience serious autoimmune reactions and their lives are at stake.In the glare of ongoing publicity, the federal government arranged for an Indian manufacturer, Wockhardt, to supply Canada with animal insulin from its manufacturing facility in Wales. But in March the company announced it will no longer be providing insulin to Canadians who need it, leaving this vulnerable population at high risk...
So.
Let's start making our own insulin so that we can take care of our citizenry while raising our heads even higher when super-fine Trumpinistas like Mr. Howard Lutnick call us socialists for doing so.
OK?
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7 comments:
When I was a young teenager and my family and I needed a break, my school-chum’s dad let me live with them and their family (my Ukrainian Flag decal on my ride is partly tribute to the Ukrainian grandmother who sustained me during this time. Butter?—pffft! Goose grease!! Her english was impeccable—she learned it as a hairdresser; her husband’s was unintelligible; he’d cut a cigar in two every breakfast, quarter a white onion and eat it raw, washed down with a tumbler of Vodka, light up the “mornink hyaf” of his cigar and say something pithy like “Good to working, no! [Going to work now!] my chum’s dad worked at Connaught Labs and we were all proud of it. I remember when the Conservatives sold it in the 1980s; my chum’s dad had retired by then but I was furious, like everybody else. But so was I when Liberal PM, Jean Chretien, extended pharmaceutical patent protection by 20 years. During Covid a number of prescriptions I need were out of stock for some reason or other, but usually that the supply chain to the US manufacturers wasn’t working on time, if at all as I discovered when presented with generic knock-offs and, most irritating, whenever even that wasn’t available and a totally different kind of preparation had to be substituted. And that’s when I said to my darling, “Why don’t we make this here in Canada?” Since the “51st-state” thing, I’m not wondering or asking anymore—unless ‘to ask’ sounds like the french translation.
Anon-Above--
Most definitely two policy decisions that have come back to bite us...And, to a significant degree, both were capitulations to that corporate capriciousness mentioned in the post.
Thanks for the fantastic story about your surrogate family!
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There are certain strategic things that any viable country must produce, and pharmaceuticals certainly meet that criteria. That and so many other things got sacrificed on the altar of Neo-liberalism. Now we are reaping the whirlwind.
Gar--
No doubt about it!
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Wasn't that Mulroney who sold it? Remember when that happened and many were very unhappy. If Trump puts the squeeze on Canada he could make trade deals with other countries prohibiting them from selling specific things to Canada so our country caves. There is nothing Trump won't do to get his way. He stiffed all sorts of small trades people when he decided to go bankrupt. He hounded the young men who went to jail for a crime they didn't committ. He wouldn't even let up when the police found the actual criminal. then there is all the b.s. from his first term and now we have an idiot who let another idiot loose and fired forest fire fighters, and on and on. He'd like to cut social security, etc. he is a wanna be war monger, he decided the U.S.A. should own Greenland, Canada, Panama canal. Lets not forget the Newark air port screw up. Canada either finds other sources or better yet, start producing important medications in Canada.
forgot to add name on the previous comment
Linda McQuaig wrote a lot on this and other follies of CanGovs, mostly CanCons. Also, I recently received a (mass-mailed) missive from my cousin Bill in Vermont, a man of much experience in both public and private enterprise who notes that the government should be our tool rather than our enemy, and that we have to shape that tool before we can deploy it for the broader good.
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