Yes, with the use of personal information by the Canadian government, particularly sensitive information like health information, there are issues. I think the issue is not so much the information that Health Canada has in its databases to study this--it obviously needs extensive information, and I mentioned the number of fields of information that were in this existing database--but who else would have access to this database and what fields of information would be shared. I gave the example of the recent court case in which we were involved: what examples of this database would be shared with researchers doing work, university hospitals, the pharmaceutical company, and so on?
So as Health Canada goes forward to increase its efforts in this area of post-prescription surveillance and adverse reaction, this is something I think it will consider carefully. It will probably do what's called a privacy impact assessment and send it to our office, as required under Treasury Board guidelines. We would comment on it then.