Hello,
With the price of pharmaceuticals shaping up to be an issue in the fall campaign, let’s look at the story of one Canadian with a rare disease who may soon be forced to pay six figures a year to afford their medication.
Olivia Little is a nine-year-old living in Port Elgin, Ont., who was born with cystinosis, a genetic disorder that causes the amino acid cystine to build up in the body in lethal amounts.
As Kelly Grant writes in today’s Globe and Mail, Olivia takes two medicines to manage her condition. One works to keep the cystine buildup under control in her internal organs, and the other is delivered through eye drops that protect her sight.
It’s the bill for the eye drops that might be about to skyrocket. Right now, Olivia’s family pays a few thousand dollars a year for the drops. The drops were made cheaply in Canada by pharmacies from scratch, because no pharmaceutical company mass-produced the drug.
Now Health Canada has approved a version of the eye drops made by an Italian company, which has attached an eye-opening $103,272-a-year price tag to the drug.
Because an official, Health-Canada-approved version of the drops is now available, Olivia’s family and others like them are finding their normal ways to access the drops is disappearing and they may have little choice but to buy the new drops or go without.
Olivia’s mother, Erin, says she doesn’t know how the family will afford it. Even though, without the drops, Olivia could eventually lose her sight.
“Nobody can afford this,” Erin told The Globe.
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TODAY’S HEADLINES
For the first time this election, the Parliamentary Budget Office is making itself available to political parties to cost their campaign promises. The Conservative Party had voiced concerns about whether their platform would be leaked if they gave it to those public servants, but the PBO has apparently won them over. “There’s still obviously going to be some risks,” Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre told The Globe. “It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out which party would be asking about which policy, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer has put his personal integrity and credibility on the line in committing to protect our sensitive information and we can only take him at his word.”
The Ontario government is appealing to the Supreme Court in its fight with the federal carbon tax. Ontario’s appeal will likely combine with one from Saskatchewan, which is set to be heard in January.
The RCMP says it is still too dangerous to send investigators on the ground in Syria to find Canadian foreign fighters, though they are interviewing family members in Canada.
A Chinese man who participated in pro-democracy activities and was later accepted as a refugee to Canada is now being deported back to China because of violent crimes he committed in Canada.
A Chinese commerce ministry spokesperson says the country is prepared to resume trade talks with the United States – as long as upcoming tariff hikes are cancelled.
In Britain, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have a message for those who dislike their Brexit: Defeat us in the Commons, if you dare.
And the Toronto District School Board is cutting almost 300 staff the week before school starts because of government cuts and a “structural deficit” the board has been carrying on its budget.
Globe and Mail editorial board on Boris Johnson and Brexit: “It’s a plan to not have a plan. It’s the equivalent of proposing a family vacation whose itinerary involves travelling to Dover, admiring the white cliffs and then driving off them – but promising the kids that, once this whole testing-gravity bit is over, and a few minor car repairs have been effectuated, all sorts of seriously fun escapades await.”
Errol Mendes (The Globe and Mail) on the proroguing of the British Parliament: “There are major constitutional lessons to be learned from this Brexit crisis, not only for Britain but also for the many parliamentary systems that have been derived from the British model. The reserve powers of the Queen in Britain or the Queen’s representatives in Canada should be regarded as a safety valve for protecting the foundations of constitutional democracy. However, as now seen both in Canada and in the Mother Parliament, there seems to be an extreme reluctance to go against the advice given by prime ministers on the use of the reserve powers, even when there is ample evidence that its use could undermine the majority of elected members of Parliament. This strikes a dagger at the heart of parliamentary democracy.”
Mark Kingwell (The Globe and Mail) on the qualities of many world leaders: “Indeed, it is hard these days to avoid the conclusion that the international order is dominated by chippy power-holders, rat-faced agitators and querulous feebs with recurrent cases of the vapours. Old-school authoritarians, confident in their power and range, have been swept aside by a new crew of hypersensitive, defensive, passive-aggressive, apology-demanding nitwits who combine snivelling weakness with braggadocio – the oldest jerk-move in the sandlot.”
Marni Soupcoff (National Post) on the opioid crisis: “Squeezing money out of pharmaceutical companies is good for headlines, but very little else. It’s certainly not going to stop people from dying from overdoses of black-market heroin and fentanyl, and it takes the focus away from interventions that could do some real good in a bad situation, such as needle exchange and safe injection sites.”
Tom Mulcair (Toronto Sun) on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh: “In a country where such a large proportion of the population has recent roots elsewhere, Singh owns a place in history and in the hearts of those Canadians who want no job to be out of reach for their children. His very presence in that role is inspiring to so many.”
Konrad Yakabuski (The Globe and Mail) on Maxime Bernier and immigration: “Mr. Bernier has depicted immigrants as freeloaders and a burden on taxpayers, despite reams of evidence to the contrary. It’s ugly, disingenuous and un-Canadian.”
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Chris Hannay