Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The manufacture of pharmaceuticals is absolutely global. It's not unusual to have a pharmaceutical where the active pharmaceutical ingredient comes from one country, the first part of manufacturing happens in another country and then maybe packaging and lab

Health committee  Mr. Chair, absolutely the point is well taken that communications need to be very carefully done when it comes to drug shortages. You don't want to precipitate any panic buying. What we've seen specifically with Tylenol and ibuprofen is that there was some tightness in supply bac

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. First we would say that we feel for parents and caregivers. Being parents of young children is a difficult enough job. To try to figure out how to source medications to treat them for pain or fever is just adding to the stress. We're obviously dealing with

Health committee  The issue of a registry for breast implants, joints or other medical devices has been raised in the past as well. We're in the process of working with CIHR to put together what's called a “best brains exchange”, which brings together experts in different federal departments to as

Health committee  The short answer is yes. We'll continue to be working with all the manufacturers, the larger ones and the smaller ones, to increase supply. There are a number of proposals already on the table that are in the magnitude of millions of units coming in. It's difficult to know exac

Health committee  They are generally bottles. The bottles come in different sizes. They can be anything from.... For example, when we're looking at retail acetaminophen, the bottles are actually a slightly larger size than the bottles we would normally have: 120 milligrams versus 100 milligrams. T

Health committee  Basically, there are criteria, called DSM criteria, for mental health conditions that are considered conditions. There are conditions in that diagnostic area that refer to dependence. It's usually called “substance use disorder”, but there are different variations. Yes, it's co

Health committee  The treatment really varies by person. It's very similar to other issues that are related to mental health in that it's not one size fits all. Depending on the individual, depending on their circumstances and depending on their illness, they may respond to one type of treatment d

Health committee  You know, as I think Minister Bennett said, words matter. Recovery is really about getting people to a place where they are in the best health possible. That's a journey. We're trying to limit harms from substance use. The underlying illnesses that cause substance use disorder ar

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. When we were preparing for the receipt of the submissions, there were a lot of discussions that happened before we received them in terms of the requirements. For the safety, efficacy and quality of the vaccines, it was decided very early that we were not g

Health committee  In terms of the remote inspections, it's true that we relied more on those over the pandemic, but it wasn't the first time we had done those sorts of paper-based assessments of facilities. First of all, the remote inspections were on the lowest-risk products, such as the APIs, w

Health committee  It's true that we've had recalls of products based on nitrosamines. Nitrosamines, as you know, are impurities that can happen from manufacturing. We have seen more products test positive for nitrosamines over the past few years. It may be that we've also had better technology for

Health committee  Thank you. The direct answer is that there isn't dedicated funding for it at this time, because we're actually working with other departments, including ISED. I'll also add that currently in Canada we have over 150 formulas that are approved and another 70 that were brought in t

Health committee  —there is one company in Canada that has provided a submission to Health Canada to produce formulas here.

Health committee  I can speak to the consultations we've done, because in parallel to the process that's going on with the private member's bill, we at the department are also working on regulations and policies in this area. In terms of the Canadian Beverage Association in particular, we've met