Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We're really talking about two quite separate things. Completed evaluations are important, because the Financial Administration Act requires that all grants and contribution programs be evaluated within a five-year period, so we're largely talking about a l

Public Accounts committee  No, other than that I would say, I'm very pleased to see the committee focus on action plans. Different members had mentioned that, and that is music to an auditor's ears. Thank you for that.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, thank you. You read my mind. I was hoping someone might ask that question. I have maybe three quick points, being conscious of time. I'll speak in English, since I can speak more quickly. Concerning the two years it has taken, I listened with interest and I'm encouraged b

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for your question. The Treasury Board has taken a few steps to improve the requirements relating to conflicts of interest. Potentially, the committee might wish to focus there next, which is to understand the issue more globally. We're talking about conflict of inter

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. Perhaps I could talk about two types of risk in this kind of situation. The first is, and it's been mentioned before, that there is the potential for financial gain. The second kind of risk is probably less obvious. Having looked at certain cases ove

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. It was really up to the department to identify those constraints. Certainly nothing came to our attention, other than the general and obvious point the member has made, which is that there are general laws of application about privacy and such in play here.

Public Accounts committee  We have audited almost everything in the federal government. This particular area, the regulation of pharmaceutical drugs, was something we hadn't looked at for about a decade. In my opening statement, I mentioned that we had done a similar audit of the medical devices regulation

Public Accounts committee  We haven't made any specific decisions about which audits we will follow up on and whether this will be one or not. We certainly see this as quite an important audit. We see that there were a number of concerns raised by it. Yes, we are considering it.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for the question. At Health Canada, we have looked at a few aspects of conflicts of interest. Our main concern was really the fact that we thought the department hadn't really assessed where the risks lie in terms of managing conflict of interest for its re

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our audit on regulating pharmaceutical drugs at Health Canada. With me today, as you noted, is Louise Dubé, the principal responsible for audits in the health sector. There are about 13,000 prescr

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Chair. Yes, indeed, we thought the program design was rushed in the case of the most recent program. We thought there were important lessons. In fact, one of the lessons from the program in 2005, TTAP, was the idea that you have to build a control into the design of t

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Chair. We did find, as the questioner mentioned, that the department fell short on the service standards it had set, only reaching 66%. In a sense, the picture gets worse when you start bringing in unprocessed files. Our main concern was that from the time the appli

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Chair, for that question. Just broadly speaking, we had two concerns. One was about timeliness and one was about transparency. This question gets to the transparency of the regulation of drugs. In that particular recommendation, we said that Health Canada really hasn'

Public Accounts committee  I'll be brief. We recommended that Health Canada disclose information both on rejected applications and on the ones in which the companies actually withdraw the application. Largely that was because of the practice of other regulators in other countries. We cite the case of the

Public Accounts committee  Yes, Chair, the response to our recommendation begins with the word “Agreed”.