Health committee  I don't know the answer to that.

Health committee  I don't know the answer, and that may be a politically wrong thing to give a wrong answer to. If we could, we'll look that up for you, Mr. Batters.

Health committee  Because we are presently considering changes to our guidelines. I am not saying that we will do this, but if we decide to change our guidelines to allow a price premium, a slightly higher price for relatively minor innovations, this might perhaps calm things down. But we do not know yet, we are not there yet.

Health committee  Mr. Malo, I am not able to do that. This is a very complex situation and we are presently hearing not only from the pharmaceutical industry, but also from provincial governments, from the federal government and from people who utilize the drugs, patient groups, and so on.

Health committee  Let us say two years.

Health committee  If I can remember that multifaceted question, first of all, the regulation changes in June of last year do not affect us, really--not at all. It was an interesting thing, and there were pros and cons expressed by the industry and the stakeholders and so on. With regard to the question about the R and D, the reason they're not investing more in Canada is very complex, and we don't have the answer for it.

Health committee  Yes. We publish this separately, but it's in our annual report.

Health committee  Actually we haven't. The median international price is sort of our benchmark, and we have a hard and fast rule that the Canadian price cannot be the highest in the world. We are actually 92% of the median international price. So we're basically 8% below the seven countries to which we're compared.

Health committee  I couldn't tell you offhand what would happen. The United States is almost always the highest, and Italy is the lowest. The others are in there. Presumably the international median would go down if you excluded the United States.

Health committee  We're going to submit it to the Minister of Health in May. We're sort of one year behind for 2006.

Health committee  Mr. Malo, this comes out of the Patent Act. The seven countries have been determined 20 years ago, in 1987. These seven countries are Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, the United States... They are the Western European countries.

Health committee  These countries have been selected because their health system is similar to ours. I believe that its on this basis that they have been selected in 1987.

Health committee  All countries, except the United States, have price regulation systems, which are different from one country to the other. We are precisely studying these various systems right now in order to check whether there are components that could be applied here in Canada. The United States do not have any regulation, except for payees such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Health committee  We are acting pursuant to the Patent Act and these countries have been selected for us. So this cannot be changed. If you ever decide to amend the Patent Act, you may then be able to change the list of countries.

Health committee  I must say that the answer is no because we have the necessary tools to require them to provide us all the information that we need. Some of them may sometimes be late and we must encourage them somewhat, but I believe that they all comply with the act.