I was just wondering if they have ever been presented with the amount of savings they could get if they could come together. I think Dr. Gagnon mentioned $9 billion. That's a phenomenal amount of money.
I wanted to ask you something, Dr. Gagnon, because you mentioned that you'd like to shake up some people at Industry Canada. As we're doing the study on technical innovations, I suppose one of the technological innovations we could look at is a way of analyzing these products.
I was wondering if you could explain to the committee how new drugs are tested today. You mentioned that one can get an old drug, or one can get a new drug. I'm a chiropractor. In Oshawa I used to get people coming in with a lot of arthritis. One person would be on aspirin, but immediately when the COX-2 inhibitors came out, they all wanted that. The aspirin costs 2¢ a tablet and the COX-2 inhibitors at the time were $2 per tablet. At the end of the day, what was the clinical difference in each individual patient? I don't know. Sometimes I'd see a difference, sometimes I wouldn't see any difference at all.
I heard that sometimes we test new drugs against placebos, but there's not necessity of testing a new drug against an old drug. If you're thinking of making recommendations for an innovation, could you tell the committee what we could maybe suggest to Industry Canada—if maybe that's the way we're challenging these drugs, the new drugs on the market? Could you give us some advice?