No. For any new prescription or in fact non-prescription drug to reach the market, Health Canada has to evaluate the information that the companies submit about those drugs.
The problem is that the trials that are done before a drug is on the market are relatively restricted kinds of trials. They tend to be for short periods of time. They tend to be done on very limited populations, typically middle-aged men and women who are not taking any other drugs and who don't have any other conditions that may interfere with detecting whether or not the drug works.
So when these drugs come on the market, we actually know very little, especially about their safety or about how they're going to work in a wide range of people. For instance, if the drug has only been studied in middle-aged people, what's it going to do to your 85-year-old grandmother who's already taking five or six other medications, or what's it going to do with your eight-year-old daughter? We don't know those kinds of things.
That's one of the reasons why we definitely need these post-market studies to acquire this additional information to be able to be sure that the drugs are used in the most effective and safest way possible.