Mr. Speaker, this is a danger for Canadians and it is also a danger for those who buy Canadian products.
In the United States, they sell a drug made from a flu medication. One of the ingredients of that medication is basically freely available in Canada. Sometimes it is also imported from foreign countries.
If that product is tainted, it will affect the entire production chain for Canada and the United States, where people take it legally. In addition, and this is the worst part, some of the production is misappropriated so that the illicit drug can be made.
Clearly, we are on thin ice. However, it is important to understand fully that not having absolute control over the quality of medications is harmful to people's health. Even worse, in this age of globalization, we import medicinal ingredients that are reassembled chemically to make another medication. If one of those ingredients is not good, we are selling medications that we think are of high quality when, in reality, they are not. That is the crux of the problem.
I would like to remind hon. members that counterfeit medications are rarely quality medications. They are produced by illicit activity and the people who engage in it have no scruples. Selling tainted medications does not bother them.