Sure.
When cost recovery was first introduced in Health Canada's health products area in 1994, I was an active participant at that point. We saw a second revision of the cost recovery regime in the decade just past. In each of those cases, the Government of Canada set down very clear rules that distinguish between cost recovery fees, regulatory charges, service fees, etc., and created very clear rules for how they have to be constructed.
For example, the costing exercise is something that Health Canada was supposed to share in advance of releasing a cost recovery proposal with industry on multiple touchpoints. That did not happen. We did not see the costing analysis until after the proposal was reached.
There's the whole matter that I raised in my testimony around the fee ratios. If it's a public versus private benefit equation, we're having a really difficult time understanding how the fee ratios can be the same for the prescription drug program, where there are no taxes and where, in fact, almost 50% of all expenditures are by government or out of the public purse, yet we wind up with exactly the same cost recovery ratios.
This proposal does not meet those requirements, in our view. According to Treasury Board's own guidance on this, that means it is, effectively, a tax and outside the scope of the Service Fees Act, or in this case, because cost recovery is now done by a ministerial order, it's not even subject to Treasury Board review before approval.
All of those problems, essentially, make this I think a very tricky matter.