Health committee  Drug costs have certainly come down in a variety of areas. I have my own experience, for example, at Health Canada, where we manage a fairly large drug plan for first nations and Inuit. I can tell you very forthrightly that our joining the pan-Canadian pharmaceutical alliance has

Health committee  It might be prudent to offer the committee that we could provide a more detailed written response to your questions. It's not to dodge the question, but I think it almost merits a more detailed response than I feel confident to give. The very clear objective here is to strictly

Health committee  Regarding the additional funding coming in this year for the drugs and substances strategy, we have a program called the substance use and addictions program, which has funding of about $28 million a year. There is additional funding that comes in over the next number of years, a

Health committee  This is one of the areas where we are out for consultation right now. We put out for discussion a fairly detailed regulatory consultation paper about two weeks ago, and the consultations will proceed until late January. There's a lot of detail in there about what the government h

Health committee  I don't want to get out in front of the government, but the intention is to have appropriate warning labelling, if you like, health information and so on. That would be a requirement that would accompany the sales of these products. Again, there is going to have to be consultati

Health committee  I think the general intent of the regulatory scheme and the work that Health Canada is certainly doing in partnership with other departments to get ready for the legalization of cannabis is that all of this is being undertaken with a public health approach in mind. Our organizati

Health committee  Yes, we're aware of that. There are two different settlements that were reached with regard to the blood issue, and for one of the two settlements there is a question as to whether there is sufficiency in the funding. I think some of the debate has been whether or not there can b

Health committee  I'm not sure, Minister, if I have the specific breakdown here. What I can say is that the $11 billion is over a 10-year period. The first-year payments have all been made to all jurisdictions. That was done in one of the two budget implementation acts. We're now in the final stro

Health committee  In terms of the minister's comment, tax policy matters are generally the purview of the finance department, so in those areas we defer to them. That would be a good question to raise with colleagues from the finance ministry.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, maybe this is bumping up against the one that's in my technical understanding. I think, for us, it's less that it's all being bought in Ottawa—and I'm not quite sure that's the case—but it's more that the change we've made has forced a measure of standardization. It's

Public Accounts committee  It's kind of centralized. The forms they're using, the fields, and the system and kinds of the process they follow are the same. I don't want to give the impression that we're all running it out of—

Public Accounts committee  To answer this question, maybe I could harken back to comments from the Auditor General and those of my colleague, Ian Shugart, around the culture and financial reporting, and the way that program managers can be oriented. That's very relevant for my organization. Health Canada

Public Accounts committee  We have a plan in place regarding cybersecurity in our department. I can give you an example. It's popular now to use USB keys on computers to share files. We insist that that type of technology be encrypted, which makes it impossible to use without a code. Now it is practically

Public Accounts committee  I'll just start by indicating that we agree with the Auditor General's finding. We're working to put that in place and to have regular updates to the management table about the progress we're making. Just to give you a little bit of context—and not to take away from the finding

Public Accounts committee  Thanks, Mr. Chair. Good morning, Mr. Chair. My name is Simon Kennedy and I am the Deputy Minister of Health Canada. Thank you for inviting Health Canada today to discuss the 2017 audit of the Office of the Auditor General on the management of fraud risk, and to provide us with