Switching gears to product approvals, to innovative functional foods, as we hear them called in the marketplace, the natural health products framework that was developed in Canada really kind of got out of control. As industries innovated, there was no home for a lot of these products, so they got thrown into a natural health products classification.
In the last couple of years, Health Canada has really tried to say that if it looks like a food or beverage, and if it tastes like a food or beverage, it's a food or beverage, not a natural health product. There has really been an effort to kind of split those and do some work. As MP O'Toole mentioned, there is an ability—if there's no clear safety or health risk—to go through a temporary market authorization process to put it in the market and then provide data to Health Canada concurrent to that experience. That continues today.
As far as other markets go, I think that working with the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.... Once again, when I say the U.S., this is not about harmonizing to U.S. standards, regulations, and rules in the food space. That's not what we're advocating. There are a lot of things in the U.S. that I would not want in Canada, but we have seen a movement whereby Health Canada and the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. are meeting more regularly to compare notes, and that in itself is starting to drive efficiencies in terms of not duplicating efforts.
I don't think there's any doubt that in Health Canada there are some issues in this area in resources, in terms of just bodies to do the work. There are some allocation issues. They're probably working in some areas and spending a lot of time on little rinky-dink things that probably aren't as important as some of these bigger things. We've been working with Minister Aglukkaq's office to try to work through that, but there are always going to be budget challenges.
I think the challenge for Health Canada is in trying to keep up with industry. That's what I'm hearing from the senior officials at Health Canada, that in the next couple of years they hope to at least be almost caught up to industry. Right now, they're so far behind, and it's a game of catch-up and hammering away at the backlog that's the big challenge there.