Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to comment on one of the key points made in this presentation, and that is federal-provincial-territorial collaboration and the lack of information and data at a national level. However, we have information and data at many provincial levels.
If we are to talk about federal-provincial-territorial collaboration to deal with this issue, I would like to ask a couple of questions.
We now know that OxyContin is a drug of choice as an opioid, that it is highly addictive, as all opioids are, and that in fact the provinces, all of them, have asked the Minister of Health to stop allowing for generic OxyContin on its formulary and have asked the government to stop the production, wherever it could, by denying the ability of industry to make generic OxyContin.
Not only did all provincial health ministers make this request, but all provincial public health officers made this request. It is my understanding that the Attorney General of the United States made this request as well.
The government's answer to this—I know it may not have been your answer, but I'm saying it was the government's answer to this—was to allow six generic companies to produce OxyContin.
Now, if one is concerned about the use of OxyContin, its ability to be syringed up and mixed and used intravenously, all of those things, why is it that one would not have stopped the production of the generic and gone to the OxyNEO? To me this is almost enabling a problem.
Now we hear the minister saying finally, about a year later, that she's considering whether or not she would listen to the United States' pleas for this. The United States realized that they stopped generic OxyContin, and now it's going to go across the border as a problem.
I want to know why this was not listened to, if everyone says they care about the problem.