Let me try to start, although I probably will ask my colleague Susan Fletcher to take some of it, especially the last part of your question.
We take exhibit 8.4 very seriously, but we also have to take it in its context. The title of exhibit 8.4 is “Examples of regulatory activities considered by Product Safety managers to be insufficient”. I would say that in the context of the planning process that we are undertaking, one of the elements is that there are many sources for determining what the priorities are and what the instruments are that should be used to deal with those priorities. One of the most important sources has to be dialogue with the product safety program managers themselves, so that we ascertain if we are ad idem.
This isn't a question of putting stuff under the rug or anything, but there is a legitimate discussion that needs to take place on the level of resources and the assessment of risk. You can take a zero-risk approach to life. Unfortunately, that's not life. You're always managing risk, and Health Canada is in the business of managing risk. Are we doing it appropriately? We have to have this dialogue with our managers about that.
Assuming there are things on which we feel we need to do a better job, we then ask a second order of question about how we do that. Do we do it through the primary instrument that we have, say, with the Hazardous Products Act, which is to schedule things under the Hazardous Products Act and regulate them? Or are there other equally effective or even more effective things that we can do?
If we find out, for example, that we're hearing from some of our counterparts in other countries that, through inspections, we may start to see lead in children's toys, maybe the most effective thing to do is to call up the toy manufacturers or importers and say this is a problem and they really don't want to have this stuff in their products. Maybe we should be telling them that if they are importing this stuff, they should stop importing it. If they don't stop importing it, we may have to use our more heavy-handed instrument, but let's start with something lighter. We could put advisories out to consumers. There is a whole range of things we can do.
When you look at this, it is actually not just a two-dimensional axis. This actually has a number of dimensions to it that have to be looked at. I don't discount it; I take it very seriously. But that's the discussion we have to have with our program managers.