In the Speech from the Throne this September, the Trudeau government said it “remains committed to a national, universal pharmacare program and will accelerate steps to achieve this system.” That is an improvement over the Liberals’ pledge, during the 2019 federal election, to provide $6 billion over four years as a “down payment” on pharmacare. How much of an improvement remains to be seen.

Behind the pharmacare plan is a simple idea: no one in Canada should be denied access to necessary prescription drugs because of cost. Currently, despite spending over $1,000 per person per year on prescriptions, millions of Canadians have trouble getting the drugs they need. The average cost of prescriptions across the twenty-nine countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which mostly have pharmacare plans, is $700 per person per year.

A report prepared in 2018 for the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions estimated that seventy thousand Canadians aged fifty-five and older suffer avoidable deterioration in their health status every year, and as many as twelve thousand Canadians over forty with cardiovascular disease require overnight hospitalization. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians go without food, heat, and other health care expenses so they can afford the drugs they need.