Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to respond to the non-question and the question.
Right now, it's a $44-million program. With the changes and the improvements, that will increase to a $100-million program, and we can go through all of those improvements. There are no billions; it's millions. We're not saying that it's an insignificant amount of money. It's a considerable amount of money, but it's the amount of money that we need to make the improvements for Canadians to go into a safe marketplace.
It's a bit like apples and oranges if you're comparing natural health products to pharmaceutical products, because it's all about risks and benefits. What are you treating? You will accept a risk associated with chemotherapy, for example, that you wouldn't necessarily with something that's to treat a headache, for example. It's all about risks and benefits, and what we really are striving for is having a regulatory system that has the appropriate level of touch based on the risk of these products.
What we've found is that there are some parts of the program that are functioning quite well: the premarket review and the standards that have been set. Again, I just want to clarify, because there's been some rhetoric around our all of a sudden changing the levels of evidence that we're looking for. We're not saying that. We're saying that there are some gaps. There are some gaps with respect to how these products are represented to Canadians. There are gaps and there are issues around the quality of these products. We've had 100 recalls over the last year and a half for fibreglass and bacterial contamination in these products. We have a concern around the advertising, the way that these products are represented and what they're claiming to do for people. We have concerns about the facilities.
There are gaps that we need to fill, and there are resources that we need for that. It is a $5-billion-a-year industry that doesn't pay any fees. These are not taxes; these are service fees, and for those service fees they also get accountability. They would get timelines and deadlines for the services that are provided to them, and it's not all of the cost. Australia cost recovers 100% of its costs for this product line. Ours is a portion of those costs.