Health Committee on Feb. 12th, 2009

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

I have another question for Dr. Roberge about the granting agency. When you are making the upcoming cuts to the granting council over the three-year period, I'd be interested in the potential cost in jobs. I have a riding with UBC in it, and there are a lot of people who are involved with the Life Sciences Institute and with other research activities at UBC.

Have jobs figured in the criteria for the cuts that are being made, so that at a time when we're trying to make more jobs, we're not reducing ones with some of the really talented people whom we need to stay here in Canada?

[James Roberge]

The main focus is on our mandate, obviously, and we'll be looking for ways of implementing those reductions in a way that minimizes the impact, in terms of our reach for our mandate. So we'll be looking at it through that lens. Obviously, we invest in people heavily. It's one of our three main business lines, in effect. So that is a consideration. We'll look at the impact of any reductions in our programs on the research community and on our capacity to translate knowledge that's been created into action.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Given the decision by the government south of the border to use major increases in research funding as a jobs creation program during this time of stimulus, and the apparent opposite direction of the Conservative government, have the research councils banded together to put a presentation forward about the benefits, in terms of economic stimulus, of increasing rather than reducing funding for these councils and for research?

[James Roberge]

As part of the pre-budget consultations, all departments and agencies were consulted. I really can't say much more than that, I'm afraid. It's part of the consultations.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Did you have job figures tied to your funding requests and concerns?

[James Roberge]

In our presentations we did look at what stimulus package the health research community could offer to Canadians.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

We'll go on. Ms. Duncan.

You're going to be sharing the time. Go ahead, please.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you.

I'll ask a question regarding generics and how that's coming along with the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board.

[Dr. Brien Benoit]

Thank you, Madam.

The issue of generics is one that has come before us relatively recently, and as I said earlier, we are governed by the Patent Act. You might think that generic products don't have patents. That would be the popular perception out there, that they don't have patents, when in fact a large number of them do have patents. They are mostly manufacturing and processing patents; nevertheless, they are patents and therefore come under the aegis of the Patent Act, and that's where we are.

This is a relatively new phenomenon. Of all the generics, only a relatively small number hold these patents, at least those that we can determine, and so far we've not had any.... We're having consultations with the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association and we have had a meeting recently, one month ago or so. At the conclusion they were going to present us with a bullet form of what they felt the bottom line was for their industry, and we've not yet received it. But we are dialoguing with them.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

I'd like to ask about biologics, as well as how might the increase in funding affect companies and compassionate drugs.

[Dr. Brien Benoit]

How much our increase in funding would affect...?

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

I'm struggling with...if you have 74 new drugs come on board and there are three investigations, what is the average cost of an investigation?

[Dr. Brien Benoit]

I can't tell you what the average cost of an investigation is, but we got cut off before when you asked me what the price of a hearing was. The price of a hearing is about $500,000 or $600,000. Some are relatively short, some are relatively long, some are very complicated, and various expert witnesses have to be brought from all over. If that's the cost to us, it must be the same cost to the industry, possibly more.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you, Mr. Benoit.

We will now go to Ms. Hughes.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My question will be with regard to the Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission, and it's going to be addressed to Mary Hill or Sharon Watts.

Basically, the commission only gets to review a small number of hazard sheets per year, and we know that there are about 20,000 hazard sheets in Canada, so that means there's probably about 250 to 300 that get reviewed a year. When called on to review these data sheets, what we've noticed is that there have been a lot of errors and inaccuracies found by the commission, and it's been actually quite high, 8.5 to 9 errors per sheet, and some of these deal with toxic effects, and there other issues, of course.

The commission has a limited mandate and limited resources. We're just wondering, to address what appears to be a considerable amount of disinformation in an area where sharing accurate information can save health and lives, is there more that you could be doing? Or have you brought the problems to the government's attention? What is it doing in response and what role are you playing?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Go ahead, Ms. Watts.

[Sharon Watts]

Thank you for the question.

In fact, this question is very timely, because we spoke of this at our council of governors meeting just a couple of weeks ago.

You're right. The level of non-compliance in terms of the accuracy of material safety data sheets is high. It's at 95%. It's been at 95% for quite some time. Of those eight or nine violations per claim that you referred to, about 60% of those are what we consider to be significant in terms of toxic properties not being stated at all or being inaccurately stated, or hazardous ingredients not being stated or being inaccurately stated. This is very important for workers.

You're right when you say that we have a very limited mandate. Two things, I think, have helped to give this more awareness and also to extend the reach of the work we do. One is when we do work with our claimants. Most of our claimants are the big guys, the big multinationals that come to us. When we find an error, such as issues with their material safety data sheets, it's not always with the trade secret ingredients. In fact, it's most likely in the ingredients that are already disclosed but are inaccurately disclosed.

Part of the issue they have is that the ingredient and its disclosure requirements then have to be changed for all of the other MSDSs they have for those ingredients, corporate liability being what it is. We call that our domino compliance effect. We haven't been able to calculate it mathematically, but we know it exists.

The second issue is that we've become a bit of a centre of expertise for MSDS evaluations, so we reached out to our provincial and territorial counterparts at this past meeting and said, “What can we do to share this information with you?” They're going out and looking at 90% of what's out there while we're looking at a small per cent, but it's likely that these issues are coming up with other companies, or with the same company for different products.

That's what we're doing right now. We're working on an information-sharing regime that will allow us to provide information to them for compliance and enforcement purposes, information that we've already gleaned, albeit just from the trade secret MSDSs.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Thank you.

I have another question. It's with regard to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In Budget 2009 we saw the funding reduced from $998 million to $932 million for 2009-10.

On January 14, the Minister of Health announced an increase of $31 million to the drug safety and effectiveness network, so apparently it's the only part of the national pharmaceutical strategy that has interested the Conservatives enough for them to finance it, although it's not mentioned specifically in the budget.

It was indicated that the network would be administered through CIHR, yet its budget has already been reduced. We're just wondering about that. Will the $32 million for the drug safety and effectiveness network come out of the already cut CIHR funding?

That question is for James and Pierre.

[James Roberge]

Thank you for the question. There is in fact funding for the drug safety and effectiveness network for CIHR. We have negotiated an MOU with Health Canada, which is the recipient of these funds in the first instance. They will be transferring the funds to us via future supplementary estimates.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

So these are additional dollars.

[James Roberge]

Yes. It's not reflected currently in our reference levels, but will be in subsequent supplementary estimates.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you, Mr. Roberge.

Mrs. Davidson.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, I would like to thank the people here today who are answering our many, many questions.

My question is going to go back to Mr. Chartrand, please. Mrs. McLeod had a question regarding CIHR and aboriginal programs and so on. I think our understanding is that there are significant gaps between aboriginal people and the rest of the Canadian population when it comes to life expectancy, the rates of diabetes and other diseases, and hearing, sight, and speech issues.

Maybe we'll give you a little bit more time now, since you only had about 20 seconds to address some of that. Could you tell me about some of the innovative research that you may be looking at to help aboriginal people?

[Dr. Pierre Chartrand]

As I started to say, we have put a lot of emphasis on research on aboriginal health by creating an institute that is dedicated to it. One of the first tasks that institute had was to create an environment of research that would address the numerous issues you've mentioned. One of the problems or situations was that even though a lot of research had been done with the aboriginal population, it had not necessarily benefited them. There was a certain unwillingness to participate. We had to engage the community in the research enterprise. To do that, the institute created a number of centres to start with to be able to mobilize the researcher and bring the researcher and the community together to identify problems that they wanted to address and also to assure them that they would benefit from that research.

Also, by creating these centres, they started to build the capacity to train people, aboriginal and non-aboriginal individuals, in research addressing issues important to the aboriginal population. It has now evolved so that these different centres, which are all across Canada, are part of a network. Today we are able to start to address very important questions for the population that transcend health--not only questions of health specifically, but also socio-economic factors play a very important role.

There are very specific programs with the aboriginal community on suicide prevention, acute substance abuse, and the problems of obesity and diabetes, which are much greater in the aboriginal population. Also, to help us better come to grips with this, we have entered into tripartite cooperation with other countries that face similar problems, such as Australia and New Zealand. This has also created momentum and visibility for the research to help attract researchers for these problems.

The last thing, which is also a very important realization, is the fact that we now have a specific ethics guide for doing research with the aboriginal community to address their specific concerns, which differ from the concerns of non-aboriginal people.