It's very worrying. We've already seen Canadians suffering significant harm from drugs that went through the old system—even the old, old system, before we speeded up approvals to the point where they are today, because approval times have come down significantly. One of the problems is that the department itself, the directorate, is penalized if they take longer with a drug. So there's a cost to their budget if they're slower.
The idea that we should actually speed up approvals even more, to my mind, would only expose Canadians to further potential harms and, in a sense, deceive the public into thinking this was perfectly safe, just as it was before. It's not.
We have to take a step back and look at these issues again. We have to be sure that when we approve a new drug, we're as sure as we can be that it's safe and efficacious. And even then, because of the nature of clinical trial evidence, we still have to do good post-market follow-up to make sure that when it's exposed...because a drug that is tested on a thousand people may be used by a million people or more.