Good morning. Generic semaglutide is now legal in Canada, putting Ozempic on the brink of a price reset – more on that below, along with Chrystia Freeland’s last day as an MP and the drop in U.S.-bound flights. But first:
Today’s headlinesOpen this photo in gallery:
The era of cheaper weight-loss drugs begins.Hollie Adams/Reuters
HealthSemaglutide goes generic
It’s a safe bet that drug giant Novo Nordisk was very happy to see the back of 2025.
For years, the Danish maker of semaglutide – a hormone that helps the body regulate blood-sugar levels – had been riding high off Ozempic and Wegovy, its two blockbuster weight-loss drugs. In 2024, Novo Nordisk leapfrogged French luxury group LVMH to become Europe’s most-valuable company, worth an eye-popping US$650-billion. At least 25,000 people in the U.S. alone started a new prescription for Wegovy every week. By year’s end, Canadian retail pharmacies had sold $2.5-billion of Ozempic, making it far and away the best-selling drug in the country.
But Novo Nordisk was no longer the only player in the semaglutide game. Cheaper dupes from compounding pharmacies had been flooding the U.S. market. And American rival Eli Lilly had come out with its own drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, that boasted a major advantage over the Danish originals: People lost more weight on them.
At the start of 2025, Zepbound eclipsed Wegovy in new U.S. prescriptions for the first time. Novo Nordisk’s pipeline of new drugs failed to impress investors, and in May, it abruptly gave its CEO the boot. When the company slashed its sales and profit forecasts in July, shares plunged by more than 20 per cent, wiping out US$70-billion in market value in a single day. Then, last September, Novo Nordisk announced that it needed to streamline operations and would cut 9,000 jobs. It was the largest layoff in Denmark’s history.
So 2026 has to be better, right? Well, now Novo Nordisk has a new dragon to slay: generic Ozempic, which became legal to sell in Canada this week. We’re the first country to get these generics, although we likely won’t see them before the summer (you can thank Health Canada’s approval backlog for that). But when they do become available, they’ll chop the price of semaglutide by as much as 65 per cent.
A victim of its own success
This isn’t Novo Nordisk’s first brush with official copycats. In 2022, the demand for Ozempic and Wegovy was so high – high enough to catch even the company by surprise – that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration added semaglutide to its drug shortage list. That allowed American compounding pharmacies to produce cheaper versions of the patented drug, which they did, in droves, for the better part of three years.
It proved a lucrative gig, not only for compounders but for the telehealth companies that prescribed their drugs to patients. One of the biggest providers, Hims & Hers – now entering the Canadian market – made US$225-million just off compounded semaglutide in 2024.
Novo Nordisk’s headquarters in Copenhagen.Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen/Reuters
That’s why not everyone was keen to wind down their operations after the FDA declared the drug shortage over in early 2025. Novo Nordisk and its investors sent roughly 1,000 cease-and-desist letters and filed dozens of lawsuits, including against Hims & Hers, but it made little difference. More than one million people still use compounded semaglutide, the company said over the summer, on the day US$70-billion disappeared from its books.
Reshaping the market
The drug maker will be fighting a long battle against illegal dupes in the States: Its patent there doesn’t expire until 2032. But Novo Nordisk let its Canadian patent expire back in 2020, and the last legal barriers preventing generic Ozempic ended on Sunday. Health Canada has already received at least nine applications from five companies to sell semaglutide duplicates.
Once they’re available – and several should be by the end of the year – employers and workers will shell out far less for weight-loss drugs. Ozempic’s current list price is about $3,000 a year before pharmacy and distributor markups; Wegovy, which has a higher dose of semaglutide, costs $5,066 a year. With generics, that could drop to about $1,050 and $1,775, respectively. It’s excellent news for Canadians paying out of pocket, as well as the insurers who spent $77-million on total claims in 2024.
It’s bad news, though, for Novo Nordisk’s bottom line – which may be why the company is now getting into the generics business itself. Plosbrio and Poviztra (names that, in my opinion, could’ve been workshopped more) are identical to Ozempic and Wegovy, except in their packaging and lower price. And since they are the same drugs, they only require Health Canada’s approval for their names, something the agency granted on Dec. 22.
“It’s very unusual for a patented drug maker to make a generic drug,” The Globe’s Chris Hannay, who writes about the business of health care, told me. “But more than a million Canadians already take Ozempic or Wegovy, and when the drugs become cheaper, that’s expected to go up to as many as two-thirds of Canadians who are overweight or obese. So it’s quite a big market.” If Novo Nordisk can’t beat the coming generics, it might as well join ’em.
The Shot‘I will vacate my seat effective this Friday.’Open this photo in gallery:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Chrystia Freeland in Kyiv.UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SER/Reuters
Former cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland will resign tomorrow as the MP for her Toronto riding. Read more here about the announcement, which comes after criticism of her decision to take on a role advising the Ukrainian government while she remained in Parliament.
The WrapWhat else we’re following
At home: The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra said it will no longer ask sexual-misconduct complainants to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Abroad: A new UN report says the Rwanda-backed M23 militia is violating the Trump administration’s peace plan in eastern Congo.
At work: Office vacancy rates continue to drop in Canada, but the recovery is uneven, particularly in older buildings.
Book it: Canadian airlines have cut their U.S.-bound seats by 10 per cent in the first quarter.
Bake it: Here’s exactly how to make karpatka, a show-stopping, twice-cooked dessert.
Wear it? I’m very much on board with the campaign to make the viral Heated Rivalry fleece official Team Canada merch.