Health committee  I can answer that, Mr. Chair. The major decrease in that comes from the sunsetting of one program. I'm just looking through my list to make sure I get the right name of the program. I believe it's the Primary Health Care Transition Fund that has sunsetted. That accounts for the

Health committee  Mr. Chairman, on the issue of the $700 million that was announced in budget 2005, it was to be in the supplementary estimates of 2005-06, but those were not tabled because of the election. Some funding was made available to Health Canada through Governor General's warrants so tha

Public Accounts committee  We need the analysis to identify the particular clients, and then we need to follow up with the doctors and the pharmacists, which we do right now. But on the issue of the 50 prescriptions, we've done specific analysis to try to find out what's going on, and I would ask Mr. Potte

Public Accounts committee  No, in fact, that's part of why the Auditor General is encouraging us to pursue this work. The work that was done in Alberta was done in Alberta only. We tried to work with the coroners' offices to try to get access to that type of data from across the country. The responses we h

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we do know about this, and we've undertaken further analysis to look into these numbers. In our system right now, we use some of the analysis that Mr. Campbell mentioned earlier to identify our high-risk cases. We look at the number of prescriptions and the number of doctors

Public Accounts committee  Well, in fact the department stopped at that time. Mr. Potter is with me, and because I wasn't with the department before, if I don't have all the information he'll intervene. It stopped at the time because of the issue of consent. The department wasn't seeking consent from t

Public Accounts committee  Well, we have done a lot of work to respond to that, Mr. Williams. We've done the warning messages that go to pharmacists if there are duplicate treatments, duplicate drugs. Those have been in place since the 1990s. We do the retrospective analysis now, as I said, case by case to

Public Accounts committee  Well, we try to intervene before there's a problem of that magnitude. I know the department didn't do it for a number of years, but we resumed it late in 2004, and that's what's in this particular report.

Public Accounts committee  I will ask Mr. Potter to give you the details of the reviews we do on that specific issue.

Public Accounts committee  We are doing everything that Mr. Potter mentioned. All of these actions are taken to prevent possible abuse of the prescription drugs.

Public Accounts committee  Well, I apologize. I did have one prepared, but I was under the same impression as Monsieur LeBlanc. When we asked whether we needed to make one, we were told that it wasn't required, that we were here to answer questions. I apologize, but I could certainly answer questions ab

Public Accounts committee  Well, I was just trying to respond.

Public Accounts committee  I can start and Mr. LeBlanc can follow me. It's true that we all have different responsibilities. We try to coordinate our actions but we have not had much success so far, according to the Auditor General. I am somewhat in agreement with her. Health Canada doesn't have any prog

Public Accounts committee  No, I don't have any opening remarks, but we're available to answer your questions.