Official Languages committee  Thanks for the question. Bilingual labelling is required for all Canadian manufacturers. We monitor this to ensure that companies are complying. Importers are for the time being allowed to deliver products with a unilingual label, provided that the information is available at p

Official Languages committee  Thank you for your question. It's a Treasury Board Secretariat policy on recognizing certain unilingual francophone and unilingual anglophone regions. It doesn't mean that the community that speaks the other language does not exist in these regions, but rather that most of the p

Official Languages committee  Several factors come into play in reaching decisions on policies like these. We take it seriously and shoulder our official languages responsibilities. We make sure that Canadians are provided with the information they need to protect themselves from health risks.

Official Languages committee  Thank you for your question. When the policy was formulated, I was the Director General of the Natural and Non-prescription Health Products Directorate and was therefore involved in the policy decision. As I explained earlier, it was a decision that took many factors into acco

Official Languages committee  Everything would depend on the circumstances of the pandemic and the factors in play at the time. We would take them all into consideration. We always factor in our official languages obligations. We take them very seriously. In this instance, things were extremely urgent and t

Official Languages committee  The Treasury Board, several years ago now, developed a policy on the bilingual regions of Canada. Some regions are recognized as being primarily francophone, others as primarily anglophone, and others as bilingual. We used the Treasury Board system to allow products being distrib

Official Languages committee  That's also when I took this position on an acting basis.

Official Languages committee  That's not something we can answer, unfortunately.

Official Languages committee  Thank you very much for the question. I can assure you that we're not putting French aside. As I explained, several considerations come into play when a new policy is being established, particularly in an emergency. There are of course health products available to prevent infec

Official Languages committee  Thank you for the question. As of June 8, foreign importers could continue to ship products with a unilingual French or English label, but at the point of sale, they had to provide a website address where the information in both languages could be obtained. This information had

Official Languages committee  That would have been possible. Our approach was not to be prescriptive. We offered a great deal of flexibility to the producers and distributors and they could have done what you just suggested. For foreign imports, there had to be at least a website containing the information s

Official Languages committee  Yes. Thank you for that question. I'll give you a bit more background. As my colleague mentioned, at the beginning of the crisis, there was a huge demand for these products, particularly hand sanitizers. Compared to 2019, for the same period in March, demand was seven times high

Official Languages committee  That's right. Demand had increased by as much a factor of 11. In Canada, there was not enough production capacity, not only to fill the shelves, but in particular to protect front-line health professionals who had to provide treatment to patients in hospitals and residents in lo

Official Languages committee  Well, Health Canada closely monitors supply and demand. That's what it did for antiseptics. From the very beginning of the pandemic in March, we closely monitored market supply and demand. We found, particularly for imports, that the supply was increasingly able to meet market de

Official Languages committee  Several factors are taken into account in making decisions on a policy like that. It's not taken lightly. In this instance, we were closely monitoring supply and demand. Foreign exporters were interested and had the capacity to send us the products. Distribution in Canada was ne