Health committee  Certainly. The funding is $3 million for CBS and Héma-Québec, actually, and the use of that funding is to support research into alternatives to the MSM deferral. It would basically be supporting projects focused on examining alternative screening approaches, and also, perhaps, w

Health committee  I'm sorry. With our safety procedures and regulations...?

Health committee  The regulations for blood in Canada have been completely modernized and updated, and we are very committed to keeping them as updated as they need to be to reflect any changes in technology, so we're quite confident in the strength of our regulatory process. It is very intense. T

Health committee  It was Canadian Blood Services and Héma-Québec. They have the responsibility to initiate the process to amend their approved conditions. They did that through a submission filing to Health Canada. However, they had been in communication with us well before that point. We had be

Health committee  I'm sorry.

Health committee  To go to the one year, I believe we started discussing that in the previous year, 2015—what would be the data required, what type of information we would need to see—through a series of meetings and then subsequently received the submission.

Health committee  The only two actual requests we've had were for the change from the indefinite to five years in 2013, and then subsequently the change from five-year to one-year earlier this year.

Health committee  Thank you for the question. The decision to authorize the reduction to one year was based on data that was submitted to us by CBS and Héma-Québec in a submission. We did in fact publish a summary of the research that we reviewed and how we came to the decision. That is on our web

Health committee  Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having invited me to speak to the committee today. I am pleased to be here to speak to the role Health Canada, as a regulatory body, plays in optimizing the safety of Canada's blood supply. The issue, more specifically, is the r