Thank you for being up late to be with us here, where it's still a sunny afternoon in Ottawa.
I realize that today we're dealing with a very specific issue, which is rare diseases, but nevertheless it does relate to bigger issues around innovation as well. I'm certainly no expert. Probably none of us is an expert on rare diseases, so the information that was provided today was helpful in understanding that a lot of people are affected by rare diseases in aggregate in our country.
I want to focus a little on looking at the new framework that's coming. I notice you didn't speak about the issue of drug safety. This is something that's currently very much before us. We've had a number of examples recently with drugs. We have one today whereby there's now a warning from Health Canada after we heard from the Americans about a month ago. This is a huge issue. I want to know if I'm correct that with some of these rare diseases, so many of the drugs are off label, as Dr. Wong-Rieger has said. I don't know all the ins and outs of that, but it sounds as if it's not a great regime and that it's much better to have things on label and within a regulatory sense.
For many of these drugs there could be increased problems in terms of adverse side effects, drug safety, and so on. Am I correct that there would be a higher incidence than in other “mainstream” diseases? I don't know what to call them.