Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
To speak to the $12.5 million, when these regulations came into force in 2004, there was no stable source of funding associated with the regulations. What has happened with these supplementary estimates is that we now have a program of natural health products. The bulk of the money, about $8 million of it, is going to go to the natural health products directorate so that we can clear the backlog by 2010, which is what the minister talked about.
We have a variety of business process improvements in place—the natural health product online system—whereby industry can come in with pre-cleared information. This is like having a recipe, whereby we say that if we know something about this product and it conforms to this recipe, then companies can make these submissions online and can receive their application and their licence within a few days. For those low-risk products on which there's a lot of information, we can do this. In the case of other kinds of products, we'll have to work on them.
We're doing a lot of business process improvements, and that's what the natural health products directorate will use that money for.
We now also have in place, with the marketed health products directorate, a system to monitor adverse events that happen or adverse reactions to natural health products. As we all know, “natural” doesn't mean it's no risk; it's really low risk. With the increasing problems of contamination and counterfeiting, this is an area we need to really pay attention to, by monitoring the adverse reactions and events that happen with the use of natural health products. As the deputy said, sometimes they're used in combination with pharmaceutical products as well, so there are a lot of reactions we need to be on the alert for.
Part of the money will be used to put in place a compliance and enforcement regime as well. The inspectorate in the Health Products and Food Branch will also get part of this money to make sure that we work with industry to help them with compliance promotion with respect to these regulations and also to take enforcement action whenever necessary and reasonable.
Let me add, Madam Chair, on the point of consultations, that Canada is hosting an international conference on the harmonization of complementary health products, with the WHO, China, India, Australia, the Europeans, the United States. It's on February 24 and 25 in Montreal.
Thank you.