As ITIF’s Stephen Ezell and Richard Owens of the Macdonald Laurier Institute write for the Financial Post, President Trump was right to call out Canada for not paying fairly for patented medicines. Free-riding on drug prices is an example of how Canada refuses to step up to what is required for a globally leading innovation culture. To demand that anyone subsidize our needs, as we demand of drug companies and American consumers, is a Third World policy unbefitting our First World country. Simply put, it’s time for Canada to grow up and to purge the defeatist parasitism that sometimes characterizes our policy-making. If all countries paid their fair shares for novel medicines, we’d all have more of them.
