Thank you very much. We're happy to be here today.
As with our counterparts from Transport Canada, our proposal touches on user fees primarily, and the minister's authorities under which to set them.
As you know, Health Canada regulates the safety, efficacy, and quality of drugs and medical devices in Canada in both pre-market and post-market regulatory space and has been doing so for quite a long time. Since about the mid-1990s we've been charging user fees for those functions to subsidize the cost to taxpayers of the regulatory costs.
Today our proposal is requesting a revised authority for the Minister of Health to move the fees out from under the FAA, where they refer to the food and drugs regulations, and move them directly under the Food and Drugs Act, and to modify certain parts of the Food and Drugs Act to make that a better instrument to do so.
Essentially, this is not going to raise fees. It requires that we consult with all our stakeholders and continue to apply all the Statutory Instruments Act requirements as well, but it will set a comprehensive policy frame under the Food and Drugs Act under which we can charge user fees, and it will do it in a streamlined fashion.
Currently, under the GIC full regulatory process, it can take anywhere from two to four years to update a fee, so we're envisioning a more agile and globally comparable user fee regime wherein we can do those updates probably within 12 to 15 months.
That's part 4 of division 16 of the budget implementation act.
It also allows for an exemption from the renamed User Fees Act, which is the Service Fees Act, which our colleagues from the Treasury Board Secretariat are going to speak to and which we support wholeheartedly. Under the proposed framework, the Minister of Health will keep, as I said, all the accountability and transparency principles, including the requirement to consult stakeholders, performance penalties, and small- and medium-enterprise mitigation, and we believe there's no impact on the provinces and territories or on Canadians directly because the fees apply largely to industry, and the pass-through is minimal to non-existent.
I'll stop right there, and take your questions.