Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and through you to the witnesses, thank you for appearing today.
I'm not usually a member of the committee, but like every Canadian, especially when you get up to my age and you see your doctor, you have to occasionally take certain medications. This is very important, not just to me as a legislator, but to every Canadian.
My question would be to our Rx&D folks, particularly Mr. Williams. You told us you were making progress on your one-stop website for notifications. You also realize, of course, as we all do, that timely information about anticipated drug shortages is very important so that our health care system can respond, and can, if necessary, find alternatives to change their contracts so that drug therapy isn't interrupted for patients who need it.
I have a couple of questions. First, how quickly will you have it up and running? I think you somewhat indicated that. We need to know how quickly you anticipate having it up and running.
Second, would your organization be willing to give six months' notification of any drug shortages? Health practitioners are very busy. I know my doctor has at least 3,000 patients that he sees, some monthly, some every other year, but there are a lot of them.
In particular, I'm very much interested in this one-stop shopping. We can sit around this table and each of the parties here can have a whole lot of “gibbaldy gabbaldy” about what the policies should be, but the basic fundamentals of our society are that we're driven by profits, we're driven by price, and those other things.
I'm looking at page 4 and the third and fourth paragraphs, where you talk about an unequivocal answer, and that you do not favour—or that the current Canadian policy environment does not favour—better access to prescription drugs, and you talk about the sole sourcing. I guess people sometimes just don't trust big companies—big pharma—when they see these huge profits. You might want to talk about the research and development that goes into it.
Primarily, if you would answer the first couple of questions...and then let's talk turkey about sole sourcing.