Mr. Naqvi, it was the Government of Canada that would have issued the licence for that product to be on the shelf in the first place. They could have simply ordered a “stop sale” of that product. That would have put anybody who sold that product immediately into non-compliance. That would have given Health Canada the powers they needed, and then the appropriate fines would have begun to be levied against that company. This is how I would presume that would happen.
The idea that the industry would somehow be unregulated without Bill C-47, which I think is the perception you're trying to leave with people who are watching this committee, is simply not the case at all. There is a very well-defined process that natural health product companies have to go through and schedules they have to follow, monographs they have to follow, in order to get a product to the market. Some 50,000 products that are currently on the market have natural product numbers, and, as I said, the industry is very well regulated.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Naqvi, as I said in my opening remarks, the international organization that watches all of these things said the pre-Bill C-47 laws and regulations we had in place made Canada the gold standard. We were attracting and drawing businesses from around the world to Canada in order to have Canada's regulatory reputation attached to their product so that they could distribute it not only within Canada but around the world.