Health committee  Thank you for the question. Because it is a little technical, I will answer in English. I am not going to speak to the specifics of the case, but I would be very happy to take the committee through the process. There was a question asked, Madam Chair, about the process that wo

Health committee  I think increasingly we're understanding the great protections we have in a post-market world. As we discussed earlier, there are many things we can do to ensure that products are safe before we introduce them to the market. Often we only get information on various products once

Health committee  That's my understanding. I don't have a detailed knowledge of that portal here, but that is my understanding. We have a portal for Canada, and Canada participates in the OECD international work as well.

Health committee  What we see in the supplementary estimates is a re-profiling of some money. There was an announcement in budget 2012 of money over three years to help support the development of some new community-based integrated palliative care models. I'm not able to describe the models beca

Health committee  Yes, and thank you very much for the question. It is something that Ontario, and all provinces—I'm a former Saskatchewan deputy minister of health—are looking for to be able to support their work. It is a three-year commitment. It began last year and this is the second year. Onc

Health committee  The question again of access to prescription drugs is a critical one and one which concerns many of us. The honourable member cited some of the aspects, such as a common formulary, and I mentioned the common drug review. In fact that was the response to having a common formulary.

Health committee  We see the strength—

Health committee  There was a great deal of work done at that time between the provinces and territories in the federal government. A great deal of policy work was done.

Health committee  A great deal of work was done. Some of that has been implemented in various ways by individual jurisdictions, but it was not pursued as a collectivity.

Health committee  There was policy work, as I understand it, Madam Chair, that was done collectively. Some jurisdictions chose to pick that up individually, but there was no will among the group, as I understand it, to go forward together. I would say that there was an interest in 2004 in strength

Health committee  I would say two things. One, the policy work was done jointly and it was decided jointly not to take it up. Two, the accord did offer a wider range of things that could be done together, but there was no specific tying of the resources to individual pieces of that. Again, as prov

Health committee  This was in the supplementary estimates. Again, this is one of the estimation challenges. We didn't initially know how many people would come forward or in what year they would come forward, so we didn't have a main estimates ongoing budget base for this. Now, there may have been

Health committee  Yes, and there was about $8.8 million remaining in our base budget, to which this $56.7 million is added. That's a total of $65.6 million for the IRS resolution health support programs in 2012-13. Again, we have people who attend at the sessions and provide support to people. In

Health committee  Madam Chair, I'll try to keep my eyes on the right spot. I very much appreciate the question. It is Health Canada's responsibility to regulate food. We have a substantial regulatory role there. Internationally, all countries are understanding and trying to find ways, as was men

Health committee  I would say that governments have been very clear that a variety of voluntary approaches have been used, including guidance to industry setting benchmarks. We've released guidance benchmark levels. What we're seeing, for example, is that in a number of food categories, sodium lev