Mr. Chair, as I indicated in my comments, at the request of the minister of health from Ontario, who we all know has been working very hard on the front lines of SARS for these past number of weeks, the health council postponed a scheduled provincial-territorial-federal health minister's conference call to deal with the council.
I spoke with my co-chair, who is from the province of Nova Scotia, and she and I agreed that under the circumstances we wanted to ensure all our colleagues had the opportunity to participate. I would hope that no one would disagree that we should be willing to provide colleagues the opportunity to be prepared to participate in that discussion. That is why the meeting was cancelled from its scheduled time. However, I have made it plain, as has Minister Purves, that we hope to reschedule that conference call and in fact I would like to be able to do that some time next week.
Regarding the composition of the health council, the hon. member is right that we must ensure, as the first ministers' accord indicated, that stakeholders and public experts are represented in relation to the composition of the health council. This cannot be a council that is overburdened with government representatives. It is a council on which we have a wide variety of members representing different perspectives, backgrounds and abilities as it relates to health care in this country. One of the key aspects of whether this body will be credible or not is in terms of who is on this body and we cannot overburden it with so-called government representatives.
I did not read the comments this morning of Dr. Dana Hanson as condemnatory of public health in this country. Dr. Hanson and the CMA have expressed views before as they relate to public health infrastructure, and I take very seriously their constructive input into the public health infrastructure of this country. That is an infrastructure that needs to be national. It is an infrastructure that needs to be built by provinces, territories, local public health authorities, and the federal government. That is why we are working toward and have improved the integration of our public health infrastructure.
For example, since September 11 we have put in $102 million directly into public health programs in order to enhance our capacity to deal with a range of public health measures, not just bioterrorism but other kinds of challenges such as SARS. This funding supports more advanced equipment in our labs, which we saw at work during the SARS outbreak, training for emergency health providers, stockpiles of drugs, vaccines, and emergency supply locations across Canada, and real-time information sharing on disease incidents.
This speaks to what the Auditor General and others have spoken about in terms of enhanced surveillance and how we do that surveillance. It follows that when we get the information from local public health authorities, that information must be shared so that everybody in the public health chain has that information and can work with it, and use it in ways that they see fit.
I also want to point out that coming out of our experience with SARS, I have asked Dr. David Naylor, who is the dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto, to head up what I describe broadly as a lessons learned exercise. Part of Dr. Naylor's recommendations and his committee's recommendations will be to deal with the public health infrastructure: what works, where the gaps are, and what we need to move forward. I have put in my own two cents worth, which is not unusual for me some would say, in relation to the fact that maybe we need a CDC-like national entity in this country that would become the focal point or the go-to place for a host of health issues, including infectious disease control.
Next is marijuana. I want to clarify this issue because there is a lot of misunderstanding. The hon. member has taken the opportunity to ask me on many occasions whether I and my department are discharging our obligation around drug approvals and medical devices, whether we are making sure we have rigorous clinical trials in place, and whether we are analyzing the results of those clinical trials to determine medicinal benefits and adverse effects.
I would expect the hon. member would demand exactly the same of me in relation to any claim around medicinal marijuana. The clinical trials have not been done to date. I have asked my department to search globally. The clinical trials that we are doing now in Toronto and in Montreal under the auspices of the CIHR, our open clinical trials, will probably be the most comprehensive clinical trials ever done in the world in relation to whether there are medicinal benefits from marijuana. We are the Department of Health. The hon. member would be outraged if we let somebody use some product for an alleged medicinal purpose without the clinical trials.
I will not be criticized for doing clinical trials to determine the medicinal benefits. In the clinical trials, both closed, in Toronto and Montreal, being run at McGill in the case of Montreal, marijuana is provided to those who are participating in the closed trials. The open trials can involve anyone who has an exemption under our regulatory regime. If they wish to participate in the open trials, marijuana will be provided to them so they do not need to worry about source of supply. Anyone who has an exemption, applied for and granted, can receive to participate in that open trial marijuana provided by us and marijuana, might I add, that has been tested and standardized so we know exactly the product with which we are dealing. We will be able to draw medically sound and scientifically based conclusions from those open trials.
I do apologize to the hon. member. I got my mandatory and my voluntary mixed up in the answer. Let me clarify for the hon. member and anyone else. We are working with the Standards Board in relation to voluntary labelling, and the hon. member says it is a failure. I and my colleague, the Minister of Agriculture, are not ready to throw in the towel. We have asked, and my colleague, the Minister of Agriculture, has even provided additional resources for the work to continue to see if we can reach some agreement around voluntary labelling. However I understand that this is an important issue and I just want to reassure the hon. member that Health Canada, along with the CFIA, has a rigorous process in place for evaluating the safety of foods derived from biotechnology. We are not waiting for labelling to do that. That is part of our obligation.
Our regulations require that these products be reviewed by Health Canada prior to being sold in our country to ensure that there are no safety concerns. We will continue to examine our review processes for biotechnology derived products.