Health committee  --you're right. I think that's exactly what happened. The irony is neither side is getting what it wanted. The “smaller provinces” with smaller budgets wanted to get good-quality pharmaco-economics, and I would submit to you that they aren't. The larger provinces were hoping t

Health committee  I couldn't agree more. I completely agree with you. They report to--

Health committee  They report to the deputy ministers of health who are their bosses and to whom they are also making reports. If we want to get into some conflict of interest questions, I think that's a fascinating one. They should be an independent body. Their bosses shouldn't be the same people

Health committee  Sorry, I was just going to comment. First of all, I completely agree with Joel. I think the pharmaceutical industry does a very bad job at proving its prices. I've actually, notwithstanding the funding we get from the pharmaceutical industry, written a formal complaint to the P

Health committee  --and a number of other problems we have, such as cross-border Internet pharmacies, etc. So I'm pretty clear about where we diverge and where we converge. To your point—

Health committee  I do see it as having to have the buy-in of the provinces, the territories, and the federal government, because all their budgets are impacted. So of course it has to work that way. I think, administratively, if we can keep it with the provinces administering it, it would be grea

Health committee  Yes, we've been talking to the government there about this problem for a long time.

Health committee  It's not even that you don't know what they looked at. I quoted you, in the case of the drug that I provided, exactly what they looked at. They looked at all the quality of life things, such as side effects, toxicities, other medications, the fact that people are more likely to r

Health committee  Certainly I do think we should be looking at the costs of drugs. The idea is to do the best we can with the drug budgets we have, for sure. So the answer to that is yes. How do we do that? I think we need to take a look. There are a number of different pharmaco-economic formulae

Health committee  I think we got about half from Health Canada and half from the pharmaceutical industry to do our work.

Health committee  Totally.

Health committee  I'm not surprised about that.

Health committee  We're totally transparent about our funding.

Health committee  With all due respect, I wouldn't care where the money came from. What I want to see is access to treatment for people in this country. Do pharmaceutical industries want to sell drugs? Sure they do. Does that mean on this issue we have a commonality of interest? Sure we do, but fo

Health committee  That's not fair. I don't think any--