We were thinking about the network not as taking over the legislative mandate of Health Canada but as an independent and fairly nimble....
I appeared before this committee a while ago as a former chair of the Canadian Expert Drug Advisory Committee, and frankly, one of the reasons I didn't sit for another term was my frustration with getting anything moving that required all 13 provinces and territories and the federal government to agree upon something. So I think you'd need to have a group that's independent but well connected with the policy-makers.
If it were up to me, I would be funding some randomized trials of head-to-head comparisons of the like of Trasylol that I described, which I think would markedly increase the quality of information.
And I'm not sure I'd do what you suggest, which is actually mandate that there has to be post-marketing surveillance for absolutely every single drug that's applied there or that's initially funded. If it's another beta blocker or something, do we really need to do that?
In my view, we don't want to reach the situation where we're doing every study just because the study could be done, because I do worry sometimes that the amount of information we get out there might be so overwhelming that we'll throw out the baby with the bathwater because we can't detect and focus on the things we really need to focus on.