There's a lot of work on opioids under way in the health portfolio right now. I could give you a catalogue of the areas that we're working on, the priorities.
With regard to the money in the budget, the government has not to date come out and publicly said this is the specific breakdown of how the new funds will be spent, but my understanding is that will be happening shortly. I wouldn't want to pre-empt the minister or the government in that regard.
Some areas are priorities for us. For example, we have laboratories across the country that do analysis of drug samples seized in raids by the police and that sort of thing. Obviously, because of the rise of synthetic opioids, the demand for those laboratory services has gone up significantly. The provinces have asked for additional assistance from our laboratories. So one area of priority for us going forward with some of the resources we received is going to be a substantial increase in the ability of our labs to respond to the opioid crisis, as well as an ability to analyze substances more quickly, and perhaps more public reporting, better assistance to provinces, and so on. That would be one example.
When Bill C-37 goes through, we want to be able to more expeditiously process requests for things like supervised consumption facilities. That's an area we want to beef up.
We have been doing a lot of work on the regulatory side to try to support provinces in enabling access to new therapies as an example. That's another area that we've been prioritizing.
I know the Public Health Agency has been doing a lot of work as well. I'm sure it could speak to some of the things it's doing. There's a long catalogue of initiatives we're working on. We would use the new resources to support those kinds of activities.