Thank you, Chair.
Minister, when the safety of patients is at stake, Canadians expect strong measures in place to ensure appropriate action taken by regulators. Currently in Canada the penalties that can be levied against wealthy companies that put Canadians at risk are the equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
Existing levels of fines and penalties in the Food and Drugs Act reflect the age of the legislation and not the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that Health Canada regulates. If I can just give some examples from my own research, I have a list here of the who's who of the pharmaceutical industry, what we call big pharma, the biggest companies.
These are companies that parents trust, that have safe drugs for their children, themselves, and aging seniors, and that have, in fact, committed criminal offences in the United States and paid fines. No one ever seems to go to jail. I've never heard of anyone going to jail. I'll just give you some examples.
GlaxoSmithKline, in July 2012, paid a $3-billion fine for illegally promoting packs of Wellbutrin and Avandia. Now illegal promotion is not just that they put up too many billboards. Illegal promotion means they told the doctors, or they somehow made the doctors believe, that the drug was safer or more effective than it was, or that it was appropriate to prescribe it off label for uses for which it hadn't been proven safe. When drug companies promote off label and illegally, people die. A lot of people die. GlaxoSmithKline paid $3 billion in 2012 for illegal promotion of Paxil, Wellbutrin, and Avandia.
Merck paid $1.6 billion from 2008 to 2012 for giving kickbacks to health care providers to get them to prescribe their drugs.
Eli Lilly paid $1.3 billion in 2009 for illegally promoting Zyprexa, so that doctors thought it was effective for Alzheimer's with zero evidence that it helped Alzheimer's patients. In fact, it increased their risk of death by 200% to 300%.
Novartis paid $422.5 million in 2010 for off-label promotion of Trileptal.
Forest Labs paid $313 million in 2010 for off-label promotion of Levothroid and Celexa.
The list goes on: Allergan, Elan, Johnson & Johnson—$81 million in 2010. AstraZeneca, Abbott, Sanofi-Aventis.... This is just back to 2008. This has been going on since the late 1990s.
Can you please provide the committee with some additional details on how Vanessa's law addresses this reality with regard to fines and penalties? Do you feel that these new fines and penalties alone will serve to deter wrongdoing in the world of profit-driven big pharma companies?