Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd just like to start with a brief statement, if I could. I want to start off by saying that, in the two years I've been on the public accounts committee, this is perhaps one of the most damning reports I've read. While, as a Conservative, I have some skepticism with respect to government intervention and regulations, this seems to have set up the worst of both worlds where we are peddling to the public a false sense of security.
On the first page of the report, it says that some products were found to cause “serious and unexpected adverse reactions”, including “septic shock, jaundice, and disruption of liver function”, to name some of them, some of which “required hospitalization”.
Instead of providing Canadians with the assurance they deserve for these products, numbers of them were unsafe, mislabelled and otherwise misleading. We are peddling, underneath Health Canada's, a false sense of security to Canadians.
With that, I'd like to start with the deputy minister, if I could. Specifically, I'd like to talk about some of the issues with respect to the withdrawal or the recall of products. I believe there were 36 out of 40 that were successfully recalled and three that were just simply unable to be recalled. Even for the ones that were recalled, it took multiple months. On average, I believe it was three months. Do you not find this disturbing, and are there any products out there right now that are supposed to be recalled and are not?