Quickly, just as a point of clarity, Vioxx was not withheld from the B.C. pharmacare formulary through reference pricing. It was just not listed as a benefit in British Columbia. It wasn't part of the reference drug categories.
If you're thinking about federal involvement in a technology that will help us monitor value for money in this sector, there are two areas in which I think we need investments. First, we need foundational platforms for information and electronic prescribing. British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan are the only three provinces in the country that collect information about every single prescription dispensed to every single patient, no matter who paid for it. Those databases are essential for understanding the population's use of medicines and, frankly, for understanding their safety and effectiveness in the long run. It's long overdue that Ontario and Quebec, the big provinces, got up to that level of drug information systems. I think the federal government can take a leadership role in helping spur the provinces on in that capacity.
The other thing that the federal government can play an important role in, and it is making investments in a couple of these files, is in the evaluation and monitoring of these technologies as they're on the market. We have investments from the federal government through things like CADTH, the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, which does, I think, a laudable job with the common drug review process. We could probably strengthen some of the investments that the federal government makes on drug safety and effectiveness in the post-market world once capacity is up to speed.
Lastly, I think the federal government can take a real leadership role in the emerging paradigm of personalized medicines. Increasingly, prescription drugs are going to be given to people based on the pairing of a diagnostic test and the drug itself. Often, that diagnostic test may be a genetic test. We need to be developing what they call bio-banks, that is, information systems to store that information, and the capacity to analyze that information. That's going to be a scientific paradigm that requires all provinces to be banded together, because in order to detect the signals that you need to do in that era of medicine, you're going to need 20 million or 30 million people in your database.