I hope the title doesn’t automatically bump me up on any ‘intelligence’ watch lists.

The latest issue of Briarpatch, surely among the smartest things to come out of Saskatchewan since Tommy Douglas, carries a piece by Don Kossick with a lanky title better summed up on the cover as “Why isn’t Canada sending AIDS drugs to Africa?”Cossick, a co-founder of the Making the Links radio collective, explains how intellectual property rights and international free trade agreements have thwarted any goodwill of countries wanting to save lives by providing generic antiretroviral medications.The problem can be traced to the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, with the ironic acronym of TRIPS, and is now made worse by the strengthening of these rights, by the United States, in bilateral trade arrangements. These “TRIPS-plus” agreements include the bestowing of patent enforcement powers on national drug regulatory bodies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

TRIPS goes way back to 1994, well before the advent of current HIV treatments, but was changed – after a lot of pressure from “civil society” groups – in the so-called Doha Declaration of the WTO in 2001 to state that “the TRIPS agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health.”

Then, in 2003, the WTO opened up regulations governing compulsory licenses which had restricted the production of pharmaceuticals to domestic markets. This was when Canada’s much-lauded Jean Chrétien Pledge to Africa Act was passed by Parliament. (It was later changed, by the Harper Conservatives, to Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime.)

The cosmetic changes to the Act’s title page have not changed one shameful fact, highlighted at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto last August, that this Act has been effectively used as little more than a paper weight by Big Pharma and the big city Members of Parliament in their back pocket.

In the, perhaps naïve, minds of the Act’s writers, large pharmaceutical companies – whose Canadian operations occupy sprawling, impeccably-groomed properties in suburban Toronto and Montréal – would grant voluntary licenses to generic drug makers so that they could make these cheaper drugs available for distribution in African countries, where government health plans and third-party drug coverage are not nearly as robust as they are here.

With the United States, home of the parent companies, TRIP-ping (and “plus” no less) Big Pharma has not rolled out the red carpet when voluntary license seekers have come calling.

American drug manufacturers have a stranglehold on the political power in the United States. They are obscenely wealthy, beholden to a group of elite shareholders, and always protest about research being a burdensome cost of drug manufacturing and the regulations which compel them to augment their otherwise flashy ads with fast-talking announcers babbling “may cause dry mouth, skin reactions, kidney or liver problems, etc., etc. etc”.Generic drug-maker Apotex has given up on the voluntary route and now wants a compulsory license issued for its APO-TriAvir, an innovative combination pill that combines three individually-patented antiretrovirals.

That’s what Parliament’s 2003 bravado was all about. It gave the government powers to issue “compulsory licenses” for the export of generic drugs. Bono loved us. Canada got great press as the first G8 nation to implement the relaxed WTO regulations on licensing. We were so proud!

The bill became law and Médecins Sans Frontières quickly ordered generic drugs for its work in Africa. That was in May, 2004. They’re still waiting. Why? Because, as UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis puts it, “governments, both Liberal and Conservative, don’t seem to have the backbone” to risk offending Big Pharma by issuing the same compulsory licenses the Chrétien Act so proudly made provisions for.

This delay, as the equivalent of about three 9/11s die of HIV/AIDS every single day, is scandalous. What is the withholding of these life-saving drugs if not corporate terrorism? And, by not issuing the orders they can, our government – along with all those of the G8 – remains a co-conspirator.