Yes, I was wondering if we could speak to this.
We would recommend a slight wording change. As we heard from the presenters today, Health Canada's role here is as a regulator responsible for the product's safety, so Health Canada must maintain an arm's-length relationship with the blood operators and is not involved in corporate or operational decisions, including the determination of funding priorities.
Broader decisions around cord blood are under the purview of the provincial and territorial jurisdictions. I think CBS made that quite clear. An initiative such as the establishment of a national publicly funded cord blood bank would therefore not fall within Health Canada's federal authorities.
So what we would recommend—we would like to support this, if we could change this—is that instead of “funding”, it would say “provide Canada Blood Services and Hema-Quebec with the support”—we would use the word “support”—“required to establish a public cord blood bank”.