I just thought they're such important questions that Ms. Harder and her colleagues were asking. I think the real goal in the interests of the people of Canada is that a national program provides better outcomes, with adequate and possibly better choices in some environments, and it saves money.
Sometimes too much choice is a bad thing. I don't know if you've ever tried to buy a sofa, but my wife and I have been trying to buy a little one for several years. We go to try them out and we can never make up our minds. When I was a medical student in Mr. Tootoo's riding, there was one shirt in the Hudson's Bay store in Pond Inlet, so I bought it, and a jean jacket as well. It was a great blessing to have only one choice.
That's an extreme counter-example, but to Ms. Silas's point about mental health, you could look at the number of antidepressants licensed in Canada. If you want to see an example of how Health Canada fails us, look at the summary basis of decision for licensing a drug called vortioxetine, which is the newest antidepressant in Canada. If you look a little further, you can see that Health Canada licenced it because in one experiment it was better than a placebo, even though in all the other experiments it wasn't better than a placebo, and it was worse when compared against other depressants. Nobody really needs that choice, and certainly we should not be paying for it out of public funds. If somebody wants to pay out of their own pocket, it's legal, but as a taxpayer, I'm a very fiscally conservative NDPer. It may surprise you, but I don't want to be wasting my money as a taxpayer. I want to be using it on patients like the one Ms. Yale referred to, who really needs a treatment that has saved his life.