To answer the first part of your question, which is about my concern, I'd say that it's kind of a low-level baseline of anxiety, not something that would wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
We know that the drug shortages have increased in time, and the lengths of the shortages have been increasing. Particularly with the extraordinary powers that the Minister of Health has had in the last year, Health Canada has moved really quickly with urgent importation. We were getting differently labelled propofol—it was, like, in Swedish—and things like that. We really have moved quite nimbly and with agility, but these issues are increasing and we really need a long-term solution.
Thank you for asking me to clarify what I mean by critical drugs, because it is a working definition that we have so far. Certainly, the critical drug reserve that the Minister of Health announced is 12 drugs so far; it's for COVID-19. The Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. has created a similar list, but it actually looked at all the inputs. It even looked at oxygen, masks and those kinds of things required for COVID-19. I would say that it's really the medication in the absence of which there would be irremediable harm or death. There are plenty of those medications needed for the people I see in the ER every day and in ICUs.