Thank you very much, Chairperson.
Thank you, Mr. Perron, and Ms. Robeson, for coming today. You've provided a lot of information.
The first question I'd like to ask—well, it's maybe not appropriate to you—is that I do find it a bit curious that we have this First Do No Harm strategy. I guess it was rolled out just in March of this year, so it's very new. It does beg the question why we're actually studying it, because it does appear that we actually do have a strategy.
Now, you've laid out some areas where we can maybe assist, but it begs the question why we're actually studying this. Nevertheless, I do have some questions.
I noticed that Nova Scotia is one of the provinces. In fact, it's the only province that's involved. I'm curious about that because I don't know if you remember, Mr. Perron, but when the Special Committee on the Non-Medical Use of Drugs did its report in 2001 or 2002, what I remember from that study across Canada was that in Atlantic Canada in particular, there was much higher misuse of and addiction to prescription drugs than elsewhere in Canada. I just wondered if you could give us any sense of this across the country. I know that in B.C. it was more around so-called illegal drugs, whereas in Atlantic Canada it was legal prescription drugs. Is that still the case? Is there a great variation across the country? That's one question.
The second question I have is this. I'm very interested to know if you will be investigating something, and I've been looking through the strategy here very quickly as you were speaking, to see where it is, if anywhere, and I haven't found it yet. I thought maybe it would be under monitoring and surveillance—that we would actually set up some sort of national system regarding the way pharmacies and dispensaries are operating to prevent people shopping around and getting double, triple, whatever, prescriptions. Is that part of the plan too? And if so, where would that happen?
And thirdly, I noticed that Health Canada is the lead on a lot of these things, which of course would naturally be so. I wonder if you could tell us if Health Canada has committed any funds to actually implementing this strategy at this point.