Finance committee  Our research shows that our products are every bit as beneficial, if not more beneficial, and as a matter of fact--

Finance committee  We've just put our regulations in place in the last two years. We are beginning to focus on this as a key issue for our industry in the development of innovation.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  We are not receiving the current funding in order to do the amount of research that needs to be done. Certainly, where there is a great dearth, or empty area, is in health care economics research into this particular area as well.

Finance committee  The easy administration of this would be for natural health products to have natural health product numbers on them, or a DIN-HM number, which is a homeopathic number. It would be easy to monitor the purchase of them.

Finance committee  The numbers are currently being issued by Health Canada.

Finance committee  Yes, there is.

Finance committee  There is a small amount of money coming from them, and there are also a number of other small incentive groups, but the research from Health Canada that Health Canada had devoted to natural health product research specifically actually had to be absorbed into their operating budgets in the last two weeks, because they were operating on Governor General's warrants and needed that in order to keep--

Finance committee  We have done work to show that the health care savings realized by stimulating the sale of self-care products would far outstrip the tax revenue that these products would generate--

Finance committee  --and save billions of dollars. I can provide you with that separately. I do not have that with me today.

Finance committee  We have not done research on that.

Finance committee  Our consumers are indicating to us that if the GST is removed they will buy more of these products, and low-income Canadians will also buy more of these products. All of these people require the products.

Finance committee  I don't have evidence of the exact amount of savings, but we do have evidence from Ipsos-Reid studies that Canadians are interested in having the GST removed from these products.

Finance committee  Yes, it is. Currently there are over 15,000 products going through the application process. Only 2,000 of those have been approved in the last three years. There's a total of 55,000 products to go through the system on natural health products alone, and we are certainly in a backlog situation and are trying hard to work with them to resolve it.

Finance committee  There are some other problems, and we are working hard with the department to resolve many of those. But certainly one of the primary issues is ongoing funding for that department.