I understand that in other countries people look at international evidence with stakeholders, particularly around cancer. Patient groups and provider groups have a sort of green light committee that will green-light stuff based on an international—whether it's Japan or the EU or the FDA—standards, so that if those stakeholders are comfortable that the science has been done properly, the drug could be fast-tracked. Then they move to whether you pay for it or not in terms of whether it is effective and then whether it is worth paying for in that sort of way.
I think all of us as parliamentarians are concerned as to where the choke points are in all of this in terms of the science. If it resides with Health Canada, then the 491 days that it takes in your shop to actually get drugs to market—And then, I think the far more important thing that Canada should be doing is finding out what happens when it gets out in practice.
In our looking at safety and efficacy and tax dollars—there's a huge spectrum there—is there something that you see? In how many cases of the drugs you look at do you also look at what international groups have done? And just from your gut—and maybe it's not fair to ask the agency, but rather any of the deputy ministers—how many drugs would we be sitting waiting for Health Canada to approve when internationally you knew they were going to be fine? It seems a rather odd thing for us to do here in Canada, when other people are taking other scientists' points of view on this and you could just get to work.