By: Douglas Clark
In July 2026, the federal Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force published a report containing 39 recommendations it believes will pave the way for Canada to finally meet its longstanding goal of becoming a global leader in biopharmaceutical innovation and investment. This would not only be good for our economy, it would help us achieve our goals of being more sovereign. It would also make sure Canadians got the best possible therapies for their illnesses, helping to save and extend life and alleviate suffering.
But only if it works. And given our history, sadly, there’s little reason to think it will.
The latest report comes at a time of unprecedented federal spending on biomanufacturing capacity and life sciences development, growing fears that recent U.S. trade policies (which aim to drive prices down in the U.S. by driving them up in other developed countries) may imperil Canada’s already tenuous access to innovative new medical therapies for illnesses, and an emerging recognition that federal and provincial systems for negotiating access rights and payment terms for these therapies are clumsy, slow and outdated.
The report revives an aspiration that has been a through-line in federal industrial policy in the biopharmaceutical sector for nearly 40 years — the seemingly unshakable belief that some yet-to-be discovered policy formula will magically transform Canada from an industry backwater into a global leader in biopharmaceutical innovation and manufacturing. Since that time, the federal government has deployed a multitude of intellectual property reforms, investment incentives, public subsidies and other policy initiatives in the hopes of making Canada a global hotspot for biopharmaceutical innovation.
The problem is that all these plans and proposals are in direct collision with the persisting reality on the ground. A steady stream of high-minded reports with little to no follow-through have unsurprisingly failed to move the needle on attracting and retaining pharmaceutical R&D investment, commercializing domestic discoveries or building globally competitive life-sciences companies. Despite the longstanding aspiration of various governments, Canada’s pharmaceutical R&D-to-sales ratio (the amount the industry is investing in research and development on an annual basis divided by its total yearly sales in Canada) has declined markedly from its historic peak of 11.9 per cent in the mid-1990s to around four per cent today. Pharmaceutical R&D accounts for just two per cent of all business R&D spending in Canada, the lowest proportion in the G7, compared with approximately eight per cent across OECD countries and 17 per cent in both the U.S. and the U.K. Not one of the world’s 25 most valuable pharmaceutical companies is headquartered in Canada, and our pharmaceutical exports remain a fraction of those of major industry players.
After four decades of failure, Canada doesn’t need another blueprint for becoming a global pharmaceutical powerhouse. Indeed, the sheer number and breadth of the 39 recommendations is a recipe for policy inertia and makes meaningful implementation less, rather than more, likely. What Canada needs is the political will to implement the practical reforms that have long been understood as necessary by those who toil daily within a dysfunctional system.
Canada’s early efforts to deliver on its oft-proclaimed aspiration to make us a global leader in biopharmaceutical innovation date back to the Mulroney government in the 1980s. Driven by its commitment to free trade with the U.S. and its faith in private enterprise, the Mulroney government saw stronger pharmaceutical patent protection as a means of attracting multinational investment, bolstering domestic R&D and creating high-paying, knowledge-based jobs for Canadians.
Its decision to do so was in direct contradiction to the advice of a royal commission on Canada’s pharmaceutical industry that was struck the previous year by the outgoing (Pierre) Trudeau government. In words that have proven frustratingly prescient to the many ill-fated efforts of a succession of federal governments of both political stripes, the commission concluded that Canada was simply “not well placed to become a major world centre for pharmaceutical research for the production of active chemical ingredients.” In coming to this conclusion, the commission identified a number of fundamental structural impediments that made Canada a poor choice for industry, namely the absence of an established “anchor company,” its low-density population, relatively small pharmaceutical market and an already entrenched international concentration of pharmaceutical research in a relatively mature industry.
I got my start in the federal government in 2000 as a pharmaceutical policy analyst with Industry Canada (now ISED). ISED has long served as the federal government’s designated champion for the innovative pharmaceutical industry and, from as far back as the 1980s, as default host to a rotating roster of special committees and, yes, task forces, with the mandate to advance and promote the interests of the innovative industry and expand its physical footprint in Canada. There have been about 13 such bodies struck over the course of the past four decades or so.
While some of the key buzzwords vary slightly over time, there is a remarkable continuity in language and core objectives from one to the next. Indeed, reading the latest 2026 Task Force report alongside Industry Canada’s 2006 “Biopharmaceutical Roadmap” evokes a powerful sense of déjà vu. Many proposals recur almost verbatim, including an American-style small business investment research program, tax incentives for early-stage investors, pension-fund participation in biotechnology venture capital and improved incubation infrastructure. In the 2020s alone there have been four different iterations of what would appear to be basically the same mandated body of expert advisors with slightly different titles. Collectively, over that period these expert bodies authorized the disbursement of $2.5 billion to the pharmaceutical industry for the purpose of building up domestic manufacturing capacity in vaccines and expanding the industry ecosystem more generally.
More than three months have passed since the latest task force submitted its report and no implementation plan has been announced. Budget 2026 indicates only that the government is still assessing the recommendations. Under the circumstances, one can’t help but wonder if the purpose of the task force was actually to deflect attention from four decades of inaction and to quell increasingly strident calls for immediate reform.
The truth is that Canada can never realistically expect to be an alluring locale for biopharmaceutical R&D investment if it is perceived as a hostile environment for the actual end-product of that R&D. Indeed, the task force report acknowledges that multinational pharmaceutical companies are increasingly deprioritizing Canada for new product launches and investment in favour of markets offering more predictable policies, faster access and greater recognition of innovation’s value.
Canada today is becoming an international outlier in terms of how long it takes for a new drug to get from market approval to public reimbursement. We are the worst-performing country in the G7 and 19th out of 20 OECD countries studied. A recent report from the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), a federal government agency charged with policing drug prices and reporting on industry trends, found that in Canada it takes an average of 906 days — nearly two and a half years — for a newly approved medicine to secure its first public formulary listing (a.k.a. reimbursement by a government drug plan), more than twice the average reported for comparable OECD countries. That is unacceptable and the opposite of how things need to work if Canada is to attract greater industry investment (not to mention, if Canadians are to access new, potentially life-saving or life-extending therapies).
The 2026 task force report boldly proclaims that “Incremental change will not be sufficient to meet the moment.” Past reports are littered with similarly inspiring words and grandiose objectives. After four decades of falling short of its lofty ambitions, the federal government would do well to consider that maybe the opposite is true and that meaningful progress is only possible through substantive incremental improvements in how drugs get to actual patients. (My own prescription for what those improvements might look like is beyond the scope of this commentary but readers who are curious to learn more can go to a much longer piece I wrote on this topic by clicking the following link to my Substack page.)
Canada need not become a global centre of pharmaceutical innovation to become a global leader in accessing it, but maybe success in achieving the latter will finally bring us one step closer to realizing the former. That would be a good thing for our economy, at a time when the federal government is eager to find wins there. It would be an even better thing for Canadian patients if they could count on their government, not a GoFundMe campaign, to access the latest breakthrough treatments.
Douglas Clark is the former CEO of the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance and before that was the executive director of the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board.
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Your sentence is so true "The truth is that Canada can never realistically expect to be an alluring locale for biopharmaceutical R&D investment if it is perceived as a hostile environment for the actual end-product of that R&D."
Health Canada is so slow to approve new end products and especially those developed in Canada which are already approved in the US for use. That probably is because if Health Canada approves then the pressure in on provinces would have to approve, provide and spend money on those new products.
I am a senior and feel that their is NO hope for Canada improving health care as too many citizens buy into the Liberals hype that Canada has great free health care. Canada health care usually delivers if you have some urgent medical issue however if not an urgent health issue it can go undetected or unresolved for years until it becomes urgent.
I see absolutely NO improvement in Canadian health care that will come from Carney Liberal government as they are not at all focused on the poor state of Health care in Canada except as you point out holding consultations and producing mountains of more reports. The provinces are also to blame however the Federal government funds health care and as such Federal government should lead and innovate with policies to improve not just stifle with open mind and money for new products that may result in more positive health outcomes for Canadians. The myth of a private Canadian health system that works continues under the Liberals all the while many private options are available for those of us who are fed up and just pay.
Deferring to a task force is a great way for organizations and governments to give the impression they are doing something while in actual they typically accomplish nothing productive.