Again with respect to drugs, Mr. Chair, I wonder if the minister could tell us about it. There has been a lot of controversy of late about it, and I heard the minister say earlier that part of the plan that the federal government and the provinces are looking at is a national formulary and bulk buying and this sort of thing and also speedier approval of new drugs.
I understand the reason for that, yet at the same time we are in a context now where we see that many drugs have been approved--I do not know whether they have been approved speedily or not but they were approved--and then we find out sometime down the road that they are not all they are cracked up to be or they have side effects that are quite serious. Vioxx comes to mind, as do certain anti-depressants that have been identified with suicide. Just today Depo-Provera was identified as causing osteoporosis, I think.
I recall actually raising the issue of Depo-Provera in the early 1980s in the House when I was the NDP health critic, in another century, and at that time I raised it because they were experimenting with Depo-Provera on women in third world countries. We asked the Canadian government to oppose that at the WHO.
We did not succeed and of course after the experiment on third world women we have now had the experiment on first world women, and now we finally have the results of that experiment.
Could the minister tell us what is the government's intention with the drug approval process? There are obviously some problems. What is the government's plan to deal with the inadequacies in that particular process?