Health committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair, for the invitation to appear here. I have a couple of roles. First of all, I work as an emergency physician in downtown Toronto, and secondly, I teach health policy at York University. Moreover, I've been studying pharmaceutical policy issues fo

Health committee  Okay. Connaught Labs—my history may be a little rusty—grew out of the University of Toronto after they discovered insulin, but it was taken over in the late 1970s, I think, by something called the Canada Development Corporation. It wasn't a federal department, but it was federall

Health committee  No—

Health committee  No; it was, in fact, owned by the Canada Development Corporation in the mid-1980s, but we can—

Health committee  Actually, we were discussing this yesterday at the pharmacy and therapeutics committee meeting of the University Health Network. They try to plan in advance for what they know about shortages coming down the pipeline. If they have anything less than a one-month supply of produc

Health committee  I think you might have confused what I was recommending. I'm recommending that the monitoring should be a Health Canada function. The crown corporation would be charged with manufacturing some of these products. It wouldn't guarantee continuous supply. If you have a shortage of

Health committee  It's Lexchin, like you're going to have in two days.

Health committee  I want to thank the standing committee for the opportunity to appear today. I teach health policy at York University and work as an emergency physician at the University Health Network in Toronto. I've been analyzing, talking about, and writing about pharmaceutical policy for ov

Health committee  I can start with the points about independent evaluation. First of all, there are my suggestions about who does the trials, who analyzes them, and whether or not these are the trials that would be required. The second point about independent analysis is that, even with all of th

Health committee  First of all, I would say that the clinical study reports would have to be made available. These are comprehensive documents. Sometimes they run into thousands of pages. Not everybody's going to read them, but people who do things like develop guidelines for practitioners, who do

Health committee  Yes, I would. I think as a clinician, somebody who prescribes, patient safety is paramount, and I think that trumps anything else. Manufacturers have legitimate concerns around things like how they make drugs that need to be protected. There are manufacturing secrets. We should

Health committee  If you compare us with the United States and the EU, right now we're a distant third in terms of transparency. With the passage of Bill C-17, with the amendments that have been suggested, I think Canada would be leading both the U.S. and the EU. Right now, though, we're not doing

Health committee  The bill is definitely a positive step, but right now the EU is willing to disclose clinical study reports. This bill does not mandate that, so I don't think—

Health committee  First of all, Mr. Young, thank you very much for the compliment. I would like to return it to you on the basis of your long and hard fight to get this bill before the House of Commons, and unfortunately, it had to result from the tragedy around your daughter. Let me briefly outl

Health committee  There were a number of potential disasters that we might have avoided. One of them has to do with two drugs that are used to treat heart arrhythmias. These got to be widely prescribed by doctors, not for serious heart arrhythmias but for very minor heart arrhythmias. When the tri