I would say, given the concerns and given the fact that the federal government has already stated that there will be upward pressure on drug costs, it is apparent that drug costs will rise for Canadians. Even when there is provincial compensation, it doesn't really pan out across the board for taxpayers who pay out of pocket or pay from private drug plans.
When it comes to data protection, what this does is it locks this into place, so we can't reduce that period in the future. It doesn't really allow us to increase the drugs that Canadians need and the ways they can get them.
If we look more broadly, we've been talking about pharmacare for the last 40 years. There are numerous arguments for the idea that we should be including drugs in universal public health care, but essentially, it would save us more than $1.5 billion per year.
Locking us in takes us further away from anything like that. Given the fact that when Canadians can't meet the drug costs and don't get drugs, they get sicker and cost the health care system more, it doesn't make sense for us to go further away from that. If we did try to move towards something like pharmacare in the future, we would face backlash with respect to the economic trade agreement and from European investors looking at a loss of market share.
Does that fully answer your question?