This is a very important question for the committee to consider. We have a very safe and rigorous regulatory system. As was mentioned in the Auditor General's report and in the member's question, this is done in a variety of ways. It's done before the drugs ever come to market by looking at the clinical trials. It's done as the drugs are submitted for approval. It's done as we put them on the market and continue to have surveillance mechanisms to ensure that we understand all the possible consequences of these drugs.
We are the only drug regulator in the world that has established performance standards on the post-market side for completing safety assessments when a drug is already on the market. Our international partners are very interested in talking to us to see if they can adopt this practice. Most drug regulators have only timelines and benchmarks for the review of drugs.
We've strengthened the user fee proposal that was put through Parliament under the User Fees Act, which now supplies a substantially enhanced resource base to the department and rebalances the fees paid by industry in accordance with the support given by the public tax base, thus providing us with new resources. For example, we have virtually doubled the number of chemists who are able to work on the generic drug files. While we are up to date in meeting our performance standards and have eliminated the backlog for brand-name or new drugs, we are not yet meeting our performance standards for generic entities. That's why we've put these new resources in—to improve our performance in that area.
We are doing a number of things to improve our performance. We're improving the access Canadians have to identify post-market issues. We've strengthened our MedEffect database and our Canada vigilance program to make sure that whether you're a physician or a consumer, if you have an adverse event, you will be able to submit these to us easily. We have strengthened our standard operating procedures for those programs. We've taken a number of steps—I've just mentioned a few—to strengthen the process of the drug regulatory program.