Thank you.
As I said earlier with regard to the changes that are now published in the Canada Gazette--and the comments have to be in by Monday--there was no consultation. We were completely surprised. I have some difficulty in understanding the rationale.
Pharmaceuticals have extra patent protection that doesn't exist for any other type of patent. That's through the patent regulations, where if a competitor is seeking to get an approval, a brand company can get an automatic block against that approval. What the Supreme Court said was that if you're going to enjoy that benefit, the patents you put on the list have to be relevant to your submission that Health Canada approved. And the government agreed with that in October 2006.
What is happening now, surprisingly, is that the government is saying they did not support the Supreme Court decision, even though they made that change, and now they're going to go back and let these patents be re-listed, even if they're not relevant to the submission, even if they should not be on the list in terms of the generic product that's coming. The effect is going to be much more litigation, much more delay for generics coming on the market. That's surprising to us. I think again in the discussions I've been able to have this week with some of the provincial ministries of health, they're very surprised and very concerned too. I do not have a good rationale for why the government would want to do that.