Let me first apologize for being late.
Certainly the savings from the pharmacare program have to be the main reason that you want to have a pharmacare program; otherwise, it would not make any sense economically, so one has to find a way to estimate that. I think the range of estimates that you put in the model, the final estimates from that, would be the main factor that would determine the range of savings that you're going to get from the pharmacare program. That's a very challenging part of this. One way others have done this is by looking at the savings that other countries that have a pharmacare program have seen since the introduction of a program. That may or may not be a good benchmark for Canada, because the system here is certainly different.
Another way of making that saving is by negotiating prices with the pharmaceutical companies. Right now, my understanding is that the provinces are actually already doing that, so there are some savings already being seen. Those all have to be taken into account if you do the costing for a pharmacare program, and I think, as Mr. Fréchette said, it's also important to know exactly the type of program that the committee is considering, because you can have many different structures for these programs, and the cost would certainly be different in each case.