Health Minister Tony Clement is engaging in sleight-of-hand with his proposed “amendments” to Bill C-51 (an act to amend the Food and Drug Act and to make consequent amendment to several other acts). Modifying a definition doesn’t really amend the draconian powers the proposed new Act gives the government over health foods and natural medicines.
A bit of background is necessary:
The dominant form of medical care in North America, allopathic medicine, was primarily adopted because of the influence of one man-and he was not a doctor-who in 1913 was given the authority by John D. Rockefeller to administer the profits of the newly-created Rockefeller Foundation. That foundation, created to shelter part of the huge Rockefeller empire from America’s new Income Tax Act; the Foundation’s profits from sheltered shares in Standard Oil (now Exxon) were to be used for two purposes: education in the poorer regions of the American South; and medical research.
The administrator of the funds visited Leipzig, in Germany, to learn how medicine was being practiced there. He found doctors commited to surgery and pharmaceuticals, so that was the kind of medicine to which he committed the Rockefeller funds. The only North American school teaching that kind of medicine at the time was Johns-Hopkins; so they got all the money. It didn’t take long for other university medical schools to learn how to access the Rockefeller millions: they quickly adopted the Leipzig model. The graduates of those schools became the founders of the American Medical Association.
Thus did allopathic medicine come to dominate health care in North America. The irony is that John D. Rockerfeller’s personal physician was a homeopath-as is Queen Elizabeth’s personal physician today.
Bill C-51 is, at its core, an attempt to force natural and traditional medications into the same regulatory framework as pharmaceuticals. If Vitamin C, for example, is declared a “drug” and required to have a DIN (Drug Identification Number), only Big Pharma can afford the laboratory research necessary.
Of course the government agencies have a role to play in protecting the public; but the way to do that is not by handing the protection role over to Big Pharma and the food conglomerates, as this government has been doing. The CHP would instruct Health Canada to make the public and the medical profession aware of dangerous or mis-labeled products, so Canadians can make informed choices about their own health care; and to prosecute manufacturers who make or import mis-labeled or dangerous products.
But Bill C-51 is a veiled attempt to hand control over traditional and natural health products to Big Pharma and the Health Canada bureaucracy.
The Conservatives have had a very friendly relationship with Big Pharma. One example is Ken Boessenkool, Stephen Harper’s close friend and policy advisor for years, who is now a registered lobbyist working on behalf of Merck Frosst Canada. Remember how this government handed $300 million to Merck for a campaign to make young girls in Canada guinea pigs in tests of an HPV vaccine? Lifesite News reports that in the USA, that campaign has been associated with at least five deaths in just over a year-not to mention thousands of reports of adverse effects, hundreds that were deemed serious, and many that required hospitalization.
That’s not the regime that should regulate Canadians’ health care, and they should certainly not be handed a monopoly on vitamins and natural health products. It’s worth noting that thousands of people die every year from the use (or mis-applied use) of potent pharmaceuticals. But as far as I’ve been able to find out, no one has ever died from natural health products.
Bill C-51 should be scrapped, not “amended” as the Tories propose; because even as amended, it still gives the government the hidden power to define vitamins and health foods as “drugs”, and impose excessively draconian regulations on them.