Timely. Health Canada used to second guess the FDA, but now they are rubber stamping FDA approvals of insanely expensive drugs that don't work.
I'm a biomedical researcher who works with biotechs, drug companies and I have yet to understand what the 10,000 people who work at Health Canada actually do. We even started allowing drug marketing to consumers which is illegal in Canada.
Quebec has had enough and started refusing to pay for $400,000/yr drugs that do nothing.
Similarly, HC approved Leqembi, which is not only ineffective, but can lead to brain hemorrhage. . But the CDN formulary is refusing to pay, so why did HC approve it?
Canada is spending over $45B/yr on drugs, many of the most expensive do actually nothing. But the governments (all of them last 25 years) refuse to invest in CDN-based drug discovery and would rather pay US corporations.
Canada Healthcare spending: $372B a year, $45B of that on drugs.
CIHR total budget, for all diseases, including cancer, $1.4B. 0.26% . THAT IS THE DEFINITION OF STUPID.
Carney is spending like a drunk sailor on war machines, but next to nothing on biomedical research. Trudeau was even worse, in the middle of a pandemic, he cut budgets by not even keeping with inflation.
SMA is a rare disease (1 in 10,000) , but the treatment for one patient is $2.4M, and Canada won't fund a single researcher on this disease.