Health committee  To me it's not an either/or, number one; and second, there's no one answer, because it depends on what disease we're talking about. For example, one can talk about primary prevention of breast cancer. We are a long way away from primary prevention of breast cancer. In the meantime, women with breast cancer want a drug.

Health committee  That's an extremely complex--

Health committee  I already have met with the executive director of JDRF, and we have many partnerships with them. In fact, as you may know, I think the world-famous Edmonton protocol that was developed by scientists in Edmonton was funded jointly by JDRF, among other players--JDRF, CIHR, Alberta Heritage--so it really is illustrative of partnership in funding really great science.

Health committee  The answer is yes, but let's be clear: we don't give money to organizations; we give money to research. So I will not give money to JDRF, but what I will do and what we've been discussing--and we do this with hundreds of partnerships that we have, including with JDRF--is develop a joint research program that we're both interested in, and we'll call for proposals from the research community and jointly fund it.

Health committee  Okay, sure. This is in no particular order. I'm trying to think of what's prominent in my own mind, about what's important to me and to moving forward on the international review panel report. The first one was that they recommended some clarity of governance issues. Where are some of the funding decisions being made?

Health committee  I can't tell you what the conclusions are yet because we're not finished. It would pre-empt what council will be discussing, so it's not appropriate. The nature of the debate divides along several lines. One line is what's the right proportion of allocation of our funds to our various programs?

Health committee  I think the honest answer is that it's increasingly becoming a primary focus. I think it's the nature of both the science and where the public is--there's a convergence here--that there are opportunities for actually focusing on prevention. I can give you some examples. I've alluded to two of the obesity projects we're funding.

Health committee  An ounce of prevention.

Health committee  Again that's an excellent question. It's a new area of research for us that is in our expanded mandate, relative to that of the old Medical Research Council. So we have been building up this area of research, of both health economics and health care systems research generally, and cost issues are clearly a major concern there.

Health committee  Other than money.... We're building on strengths here. Both the budget statement and Advantage Canada, which came in the fall—

Health committee  The comparisons are somewhat difficult, because there are different programs, et cetera. Our total budget, if you include the Canada research chairs, the networks of centres of excellence, and indirect costs, is approaching now $900 million. Per capita, the United States is still about fourfold beyond Canada in per capita terms.

Health committee  That's a very good question. Let me try to answer it. We do at least two kinds of planning every year. One kind of planning of course involves strategic planning, the strategic priorities. The second kind is our budgetary planning, what our budget expenditure is going to be for the next year.

Health committee  Okay, there are two questions there, Dr. Bennett. Let me try to answer each of them. Regarding the first one, about trainees, although in the main estimates it looks as though we're decreasing the amount of funding going to trainees, in fact the reality is otherwise. The reason it looks like that is that we're getting considerably more money through the Canadian graduate scholarship program, which is not shown in the main estimates for CIHR.

Health committee  There are a couple of parts to your question. Let me try to answer each of them. For almost all of our programs, we don't require partnerships. We actually line up the partners ourselves. We would go to the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, or a drug company and would line up the partnerships for our programs.

Health committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It is a pleasure for me to be here before the committee once again. I was last here in May of 2005, when the committee recommended my nomination as CIHR president for a second five-year term. Thank you. I would like to start by acknowledging and introducing two officials, who are my colleagues, with me here today: Jim Roberge, CIHR's chief financial officer; and Dr.