Merci, monsieur le président.
Through you to Mr. Caron. Very quickly, as we pointed out in our submission, the promotion of health and patient safety is not incompatible with innovation for the FDA. It is not incompatible with the role of innovation for the European Medicines Agency. Indeed, the Government of Canada, through the leadership of federal health minister, Rona Ambrose, has embarked on a health innovation panel to drive the sustainability of the health system, the thing that federal government is working toward, and which includes the provincial and territorial partners in that regard. They all see health innovation and medical science innovation as a key enabler of driving health system sustainability.
To your specific question with respect to the PMRA, in a former life, as some of you know, I've testified before this committee wearing various hats. By way of disclosure I worked for a corporation that had an interest in some of the products that the PMRA regulated. The pursuit of innovation and science was to ensure that you had a science and evidence-based risk management framework through the PMRA. Again, I didn't find at the time that those objectives were incompatible. I appreciate the environment commissioner's report, but as long as human health and safety is paramount and driven in an evidence-based way, science and health care can co-exist. We think that making human health sciences a priority as you move into budget 2015 and the asks that we have made don't involve any money or any disclosure, or disbursements of the forthcoming federal surplus, but a lot of policy and regulatory-based change.
So in short we think it can be done and that Health Canada in that respect should mirror what other leading jurisdictions have done in ensuring that there's a health and innovation mandate and, indeed, we are encouraged by the health innovation panel that the federal Minister of Health has appointed. We'll be making submissions to them in short order with this recommendation.