Canada's Access to Medicines Regime

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Canada's Access to Medicines Regime, previously called the Jean Chrétien Pledge to Africa Act, is a piece of Canadian legislation to amend Canada's Patent Act in order to reflect the changes in intellectual property rules made by the August 30th decision at the World Trade Organization in 2003, specifically those allowing countries with generic pharmaceutical-manufacturing capacity to produce products for developing countries without such capacity, for the purposes of serving public health. Canada was the first country to amend its laws to correspond to the changes, though now the European Union and Norway have begun their own programs.

Though the law has been in force since 2005, by mid-2006 it had yet to be used for its stated purpose: to send cheap drugs overseas. Health Minister Tony Clement in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper admitted this problem at the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto, and promised an expedited investigation into making the program more effective. The legislation stipulated a review must be conducted two years after it gained royal assent, though this deadline passed in May 2007 and as of August 2007 no such report has been tabled.

Critics have complained that the law is more limited than it needs to be to comply with the TRIPS Agreement, which sets rules intellectual property at the WTO. Specifically, it contains a schedule of eligible drugs that can be manufactured using the bill, when no such limited list is required.

In July 2007, it was announced that Rwanda would purchase fixed-dose combination drugs manufactured by Apotex to treat HIV patients. This contract was facilitated by Medecins sans frontieres, and represents the first attempt to utilize the legislation.