In doing the investigation into Vanessa's death, I found out the regulators in each country. Janssen-Ortho, for example—their head office is in Belgium, Janssen Research Foundation—would only communicate with each regulator in each jurisdiction individually and talk about the deaths or injuries within their jurisdiction. And so at the inquest into Vanessa's death, our counsel asked how many deaths there had been worldwide. The vice-president could not answer because it was not routinely part of her job to investigate and find out how many people worldwide had died from a drug.
These companies have more money than many countries—I'm not exaggerating—with capital values of over $100 billion. There are more than 100 countries in the world that have nowhere near that kind of money. They deal with the regulators on a one-to-one basis.
In 1998, Prepulsid had a black box warning on it, the highest level of warning, coordinated with the FDA, but they didn't put that warning on the drug in Canada because no one told them they had to.
These are the games the pharmaceutical companies play. If they're ordered to do something, they do it. If they aren't, they maintain the drug is safe and keep selling it.
Minister Dosanjh announced he was going to move forward with compulsory adverse drug reaction reporting for doctors, but nothing ever happened. I can only assume he received huge lobbying pressure from the Canadian Medical Association and the pharmaceutical industry to not bring it forward.