Editor’s Note: Despite what many American pundits, politicians, and activists claim, Canada’s health care system is anything but a model to be emulated. This paper explores the total time patients in Canada are forced to wait to gain access to new pharmaceutical and biological medicines, also known as patented drugs.

This annual report provides patients with some of the information they need to determine whether the time they wait for access to new medicines in Canada is unnecessarily long, and whether publicly funded and managed drug insurance programs provide adequate benefits and choice for patients. We hope that this report will encourage policy makers to consider policy alternatives that empower consumers with greater choice. This report focuses on new patented medicines because this class of drugs is uniquely affected by public policies that delay access for patients. Because government approval of generic drugs is based on the assumption that generics are copies of new drugs that have previously been approved, there is no substantive delay (observed or expected) before the public has access to generic products; consequently, this class of drugs is not studied in this report.