Canada's One License Solution Update

snail's pace

Progress on the debate around Canada's innovative "one licence solution" (see earlier post on Afro-IP here) for creating access to life saving drugs is contained in a piece in the Ottawa Citizen (click here):

"Advocates say the private member’s bill [up for a vote on Wednesday] contains reforms needed to make Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR), adopted unanimously by Parliament in 2004, actually function. But opponents insist it won’t work, largely because Canadian generic drugs are too expensive to attract interest from impoverished developing nations."

Whilst the article contains interesting dialogue on the debate and as noble as the legislation appears to be, the people without access to these drugs have been dying since that debate started almost a decade ago. It is a depressing state of affairs because, assuming that the legislation has the potential to work, the real challenge will only commence once the legislation is in place and if the time taken to debate the legislation is any indication of the time it will take to overcome this future challenge, one feels that the legislation is bound to fail anyway.

Coming up this week: the latest Gap Case in RSA, an IP update from Kenya and Afro-IP gets more contributors. Stay tuned.