Thank you.
Thank you very much for that introduction. I will allow it because it's your birthday.
I do have a question for Professor Beaulieu-Guay.
As was mentioned already, your bio on the University of Saskatchewan's website states that your research “challenges the commonly held belief that public consultations are, at best, useless or, at worst, are another venue for corporate lobbying.” You're basically saying that your research indicates that public consultations and stakeholder consultations are important and that they do have an impact.
That's been my experience, and I want to give you two examples. Going back to the natural health product discussion that we had, I too was concerned about the impact of costs, specifically in cost recovery, to be able to fund oversight and accountability. I was concerned about the cost, and I know that other small businesses, especially, in that space were really concerned about the cost of that oversight.
There were thousands of stakeholder consultations that were accepted by Health Canada. There were about 4,600 submissions in which they talked about everything from the burden of labelling to the burden of cost for cost recovery. Since that time, very recently, Health Canada responded with changes to cost recovery where they lowered the total cost recovery by half, and also, in some cases, they actually reduced the fees by up to 72%. They also phased in the cost-recovery approach over seven years to make sure that it would have less of an impact and would allow businesses to adjust. On top of that phased-in approach and reduction in fees, it also kept the already existing small business discounts. Again, it recognized the fact that it heard from Canadians about the potential impact this could have on small businesses, so it kept the small business discounts as well.
That's just one example of where the interaction among Canadians, small businesses and Health Canada had an impact. I would say it was a large impact on proposed regulations that were going to come into force.
Can you speak a little about how stakeholders and non-experts actually do influence the regulations that come out of organizations like Health Canada?