Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank you for coming. It was very interesting.
I was interested to hear from the farmers of Canada about the issue of accessibility, or the lack of it, to generic products that may or may not be just as good as the other ones on the market and less expensive, etc., and that give you a competitive edge. That's interesting.
I want to go to Mr. Bennett. The whole concept of the precautionary principle is something that we do in medicine: first do no harm. That's the best description of the precautionary principle. If you find that something is actually showing, even though at the beginning it wasn't showing any side effects and suddenly you see adverse effects occurring, then you have to go back and say that you need to check this out because you can't afford.... I was really disturbed to hear that you have people who have been extended conditionally for over 15 years.
The damage, as I said yesterday to someone, is a generational damage. A whole generation of people can be damaged by this kind of thing. I am concerned about that, and I'm concerned about the ideology that says a precautionary principle is a bad thing, because the primary reason for this act is to look at the environment and at the health and safety of humans. This should be the primary concern, and I think Mr. Friesen said that should be the primary concern.
My question for you is this. We have this problem with the human drugs in terms of the whole drug agency: we don't know anything that goes on in clinical trials. In Europe, many aspects of clinical trials are open to the public. Even in the United States the FDA does have the ability for people to see what clinical trials did show, without of course giving away the whole intellectual property of the particular drug itself. Yet this isn't happening in Canada, and the Auditor General said so. It's not happening with drugs. I wanted to ask you this: is it happening with the PMRA? Are they actually giving people information with regard to what clinical trials showed and are they posting adverse effects?