A federal private member's bill aims to cut through the red tape hampering generic drug companies from shipping cheap HIV/AIDS drugs to developing countries.

On Wednesday, MPs will review New Democrat MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis's bill, designed to reform Canada's access to medicines law.

'We're starting to finally see that not everyone is seeing HIV infection as a death sentence in some of these low-income countries.'— Dr. Jane Philpott

When Canada passed its access to medicines legislation five years ago with support from all parties, it was lauded as a world leader.

The intent of the access to medicines regime was to allow generic drug manufacturers to compete to supply less-expensive drugs to developing countries for diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Under the current legislation, generic drug makers must obtain a special licence each time they want to sell a drug to a country over a certain time, and pay royalties to the patent-holding drug companies on any such sales.

But the current law is not working, Wasylycia-Leis said. Since it was passed, the process has proved so complicated that only one order of HIV drugs was ever made and sold. It reached Rwanda last year.

No generic drug manufacturer in Canada and no other developing country has indicated a willingness to go through the cumbersome process again, according to Wasylycia-Leis's website.

On Tuesday, 59 prominent Canadians, including former prime minister Paul Martin, former UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis, past international president of Médecins Sans Frontières Dr. James Orbinski, and arts leader Karen Kain, published an open letter to Canadian members of Parliament and senators urging them to support proposed legislation to streamline the process.

If passed, the signatories to the letter say the legislation will:

• Reduce red tape by letting generic drug manufacturers fill multiple orders of the same drug to different countries under one simple licence, without a time limit.
• Maintain compensation by way of royalties paid to patent-holding drug companies.
• Come at no cost to taxpayers.

Preventable deaths

Last week, a report by the World Health Organization and Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, said new HIV infections have been reduced by 17 per cent over the past eight years, since the UN Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS was signed.

Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS, credited the decline in part to HIV prevention.

"We're starting to finally see that not everyone is seeing HIV infection as a death sentence in some of these low-income countries," said Dr. Jane Philpott, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Toronto, who spent years working in Africa — much of it with people with HIV.

The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network is lobbying MPs to support the private member's bill, which will be debated on Wednesday. So far, the NDP and Bloc Québécois are solidly behind it.

"As we are fiddling here, people are dying, and those deaths are preventable," said Richard Elliott, executive director of the network. "We could be getting medicines out the door."