Thank you.
It's a very important question. What we would try to reassure the committee and to communicate to the committee is that when we are trying to assess the time between getting some piece of information and putting out a communication.... If we assess this to be a real and serious signal that affects the health of Canadians, obviously two years will be far too long. We don't wait. Those are prioritized and those are done immediately.
There are some signals where we would say more information needs to be gathered. We would take the time to make sure that we are confident the advice we would be giving to Canadians is, in fact, the right advice. We would say that the standard operating procedures—the clarification, which the Auditor General suggested, that we are very clear about how we prioritize that work, and set ourselves timelines.... We are meeting those timelines, as my colleague mentioned, and these signals are so unlike each other that one timeline in a sense wouldn't be appropriate for all of them. What's important is that they are done in the priority that reflects their seriousness. So for some, 24 hours would be the right timeline, and for others much longer, and different mechanisms and tools would be used.
We are comfortable that we are addressing those in a timely way, and that's, I think, the prioritization that my colleague was flagging. We always want to be making sure that we are doing a better job, though, and that's why we look to these system improvements, these process improvements, and these procedures to help us ensure that we are always catching the important ones early and that we are, in fact, setting timelines for all of them. I think that's the spirit of the way in which we're looking at this.