Natural Resources committee  I'll qualify it by saying I'm not the best person to answer that. The people who are closest to it and in day-to-day contact with patients will be best able to inform you. They include a combination of nuclear medicine specialists and those in other associated specialties, like c

Natural Resources committee  Could I also speak to that? Every expert we spoke to, every group we reviewed with, established for the foreseeable future—10, 15, 20 years—a firm base of technetium demand. They also saw that there were significant ways that you could use new technology, with advanced spec cam

Natural Resources committee  I think the intent was always that it would be “all research”, but as to what forms of research, it would be materials testing.

Natural Resources committee  I can't speak to the minister's comments. If it's a question of money to lay the groundwork and how you could interpret that, what we were looking for is the decision to start. We would not suggest that anybody make this kind of multi-million dollar decision without very strong

Natural Resources committee  Do you want me to go first? I'll do the layperson first. One of the reasons we recommend that multi-purpose is if you think of this over a 40- or 50-year time span, when those reactors were built nobody had even thought of isotopes. Isotopes came along in the 1970s. So they gre

Natural Resources committee  On the reactor-based products and the processing that follows, I hope we'd look to design we'd learned from the lessons of the past. As I said, I think the European experience and the reasons companies like Covidien and Lantheus can interchange is that their European facilities h

Natural Resources committee  Right.

Natural Resources committee  When we focused on the multi-purpose research reactor, as I said at the beginning, it really talks to the broader policy issues of where Canada's emphasis is from a research point of view, from a commercial development point of view, and from that of job creation. If a major focu

Natural Resources committee  We heard the statement, as everyone else did. We looked at this from a patient perspective, from the question of achieving a sustainable supply of technetium 99. You are correct, a global solution is absolutely necessary. It is a global marketplace. Anything that happens has to t

Natural Resources committee  First of all, if Mr. Littlejohn was saying that I'm the doctor here, I'm not. You would have received a better answer to that question from Dr. Turcotte last week. When you say “locate” in terms of who's impacted, do you mean at the patient level?

Natural Resources committee  Going back to the lessons learned through December 2007 and the ad hoc group brought together to advise the Minister of Health, I think the work that's been done over the last year has been a remarkable testament of the commitment and dedication of the medical community and the b

Natural Resources committee  I would echo those comments. There are definitely two levels of diversity. We also talked about--and I think you mentioned it--the issues of interchangeability. On part of the problem today, you heard that the target that gets irradiated looks like a ruler, but in a different p

Natural Resources committee  I certainly look forward to a reply. I believe there is one coming, hopefully, in the not too distant future. It's four months since the report was filed. My primary concern will be to get a good, comprehensive response to it. I think when we said “expeditiously”, particularly as

Natural Resources committee  The range that we put on both the start time and the cost really comes back to the broader policy issues of what other elements of nuclear research and nuclear industry Canada wants to be involved in. The more functions you layer into the multi-purpose reactor, the higher the cos

Natural Resources committee  I don't have a formal presentation. I certainly won't use the time allotted. I am here as an individual, but obviously as the person who chaired the expert committee on the medium- to long-term supply situation. In that context, we did look at the current situation, only to the