Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, officials, for being here. As I said earlier I appreciate it. I'd like to first talk about off-label use of drugs as an issue. That is the misleading advertising for unapproved uses of drugs. The International Journal of Risk and Safety examined how Health Canada regulates and enforces Canadian drug advertising. It reviewed complaints for a decade between 2000 and 2011, and it concluded that Health Canada was not doing enough.
The official opposition asked an order paper question that revealed Health Canada received 359 complaints about pharmaceutical advertising, but didn't levy a single fine in response. They wrote letters and Health Canada “worked with them to achieve compliance”. There are big fines under the amendments of Vanessa's Law to the Food and Drug Act, big fines of $500 million and so forth, but if you don't enforce them why would anybody take it seriously?
We appreciate your having to work with companies to achieve compliance, but if there are no teeth in the rules prohibiting it, why are they ever going to comply or ever going to do the right thing? If you just get a warning letter, what does it matter?