CPC Ontario Division and CPC National have been engaged with a number of consumer groups in efforts to bring down the cost of prescription drugs in Canada. The battle goes back to the days when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney changed the patent legislation as it pertained to prescription drugs by extending patent protection. The almost immediate result was a rapid increase in the cost of prescription drugs - an increase due, in large measure, to the restrictions placed on the generic drug industry.

Many years later Canadians in all provinces are faced with increasingly high costs of prescription drugs. Thousands of people are without any protection from these escalating costs and are faced with choices such as "do I eat, pay my rent or get my prescription filled?" Even those who have some protection through employee insurance plans, social assistance programs or seniors' drug plans are facing the same hard choices as their coverage frequently does not cover specialized medications.

With the Mulroney government's 1987 changes to the Patent Act, brand name drug companies made a public commitment to increase their annual research and development (R&D) expenditure to 10 percent of their Canadian sales revenue. However, the latest annual report of the federal government's drug price watchdog, the Patented Medicine Prices Board (PMPRB), shows that for the sixth consecutive year Big Pharma's R&D-to-sales ratio is below the level the industry promised when the Mulroney government increased their market monopolies.

Today we are faced with a major challenge. The protected companies, the Research and Develop-ment Companies as they advertise themselves, have never met their promise of increasing their research and development activity in Canada but their prices have continued to rise, their share of the market is still overwhelming and consumers are paying the cost. What is interesting is that we have seen some of the generic manufacturers increase their investment in research and jobs while not be-ing under any obligation to do so.

Now we are once again hearing that the drug manufacturers are spending more on marketing their drugs than on research both in Canada and in the United States. A report released in January 2008 by Marc-André Gagnon of the Université du Québec à Montréal and Joel Lexchin of Toronto's York University (recently reported on the CBC TV national news) found that drug companies spent US$57.5 billion on promotional activities in 2004. By comparison, spending on industrial pharmaceutical research and development was $31.5 billion in the same year.

We must demand of all governments in Canada - both federal and provincial - that this situation be changed. We must remind our governments that research and development was the quid quo pro for extended patent protection. This well-documented abuse of that protection situation must come to an end. If enough of us write letters, e-mail and phone our governments and members of Parliament we can affect change by ending the special protection and, by so doing, bring down the cost of needed prescription drugs.