moved that Bill C-224, An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act (natural health products), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, it is certainly a pleasure for me to rise for the second Parliament in a row to present a bill to restore the traditional definition of natural health products.
Canadians watching at home might recall that back in the last Parliament, in 2023, the Trudeau government of the day introduced Bill C-47, the budget implementation act, which redefined natural health products. Basically, they had a stand-alone regulatory body that had its own regulations and legislation. The government of the day changed that to make natural health products regulated the same way as therapeutic drugs, which has meant that all the processes Health Canada uses to pre-approve sites and pre-approve natural health products are now the same as those for therapeutic drugs.
This has meant that getting something as simple as a vitamin B complex to the marketplace is just as complicated and potentially as convoluted as getting a new cancer treatment drug to the marketplace. Of course, the government's intention through Bill C-47's change to the definition was to do cost recovery on the natural health product industry the same way that it is done in the pharmaceutical industry. Given that big pharmaceutical industries have billions of dollars of research and development funds and have a completely regulated allopathic health care system, natural health products cannot compete in that space.
We will talk more about that red tape, but I just want to be clear with Canadians that there was no consultation at the time that Bill C-47 was brought in. As a matter of fact, there was no debate. I could not find anything the government said at the time about natural health products. They were just tucked into the massive omnibus budget implementation act. The Natural Health Products Protection Association had no idea. The Canadian Health Food Association had no idea. The Direct Sellers Association of Canada had no idea. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business did not know. This plan was hatched in a back room, where Health Canada officials, I am assuming, basically duped the minister of the day, Mark Holland, into putting this into the budget implementation act.
It created a firestorm of activity. Parliamentarians who were here in the last Parliament will remember the various campaigns that were initiated by Canadians across the country, whether it is the Natural Health Products Protection Association's campaign or the Canadian Health Food Association's “Save Our Supplements” campaign. I have a stack of cards from concerned Canadians in my office, as I think the Speaker does as well, that is at least two feet high.
Canada's Parliament is supreme in this matter, and that should not be overlooked by Health Canada officials who want to have their way all the time when Canadians are concerned. Our job as parliamentarians is to make sure that the laws and regulations thereunder reflect what Canadians' wishes are. Overwhelmingly, Parliament has been told time and time again by Canadians, whether they are involved in the business directly or are consumers, that they do not want their government to treat natural health products like they are therapeutic drugs. They want the traditional definition restored.
If we go back to 1998, there were 53 recommendations in the health committee report suggesting that natural health products be regulated, classified and categorized on their own. There was opposition when an attempt was made to change the law in 2014 by the creation of Vanessa's Law. The thought was that Health Canada could sneak health products in under the Vanessa's Law rubric.
There was push-back on that at that particular point in time, which led to massive industry consultation with Canadians. Of course, natural health products have been regulated on their own since that time in 2014-15. This actually created an opportunity, because of the consultations of the previous Harper government, for the natural health products industry to flourish and become the gold standard, or at least it was the gold standard for a number of years, until Bill C-47 was passed.
The bill in the previous Parliament was Bill C-368. It is now Bill C-224. I just want to say how important it is that Canadians understand that if the bill does not pass, Health Canada will have the power to regulate natural health products as if they are therapeutic drugs. We need to undo that. It is a cash grab by Health Canada, to basically charge the fees that it wants to charge. It was called the self-care framework for a time. This would massively increase the cost of creating a site licence and it would also massively increase the cost of getting a product to market.
Prior to Bill C-47, Canada was an icon and had the highest standard of regulations for natural health products globally. The International Alliance of Dietary/Food Supplement Associations, IADSA, in its written submission at committee on Bill C-368 in the previous Parliament, said:
Up to now, Canada has been a world leader in the regulation of dietary supplements. We fear that the proposed changes to Canada's regulatory framework for natural health products risk creating an environment that could stifle the industry and limit Canadians' access to high-quality supplements.
IADSA has always promoted the Canadian model as a global reference point for governments across the world who are creating or redeveloping their regulatory systems. This Canadian model is recognized as providing consumers access to products which are safe and beneficial while fostering innovation and supporting investment in the sector.
That is the same shape the Harper administration left the natural health products industry in. There are precisely the same challenges with the changes proposed in Bill C-47. It has undone all of that good work and created uncertainty in this environment.
Our brand is very reputable, or at least it was. For products, manufacturers and distributors across the world, if a product had a natural product number and the made-in-Canada symbol on the label, it was trusted pretty much globally. A natural health product sold around the world that was developed, processed and regulated in Canada was trusted to be safe. The contents in the bottle matched the contents on the label or matched the labelling requirements. That was our reputation, but that is not the case anymore.
The changes that have been proposed under Bill C-47 and the self-care framework are basically going to create licence fees that would stop or wipe out a lot of manufacturers. This is for traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda medicine, homeopathy and so on. This is very concerning because 80% of Canadians use these products.
The cost-recovery framework that was proposed would have new product fees of up to $4,000 per product. If we look at traditional Chinese medicine, the ingredients are combined to get a very select remedy for clients. If a fee had to be paid every time the ingredients were combined to make a traditional Chinese medicine product, that would make it virtually impossible for traditional Chinese medicine practitioners to be effective and sell their products at a price point that users of traditional Chinese medicine could afford. It would wipe out traditional Chinese medicine.
This would have a huge impact on our economy at a time when job numbers are not necessarily great. There are 54,000 direct employees in Canada who are working in this space. If we were to lose a wide swath of traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine and all of these things, it would be a tremendous loss to our economy.
I want to be clear that this was done under the previous Trudeau administration. Gender-based analysis was a big issue for the previous administration, but when this change was imposed, there was no gender-based analysis done on the impacts of changing the traditional definition of therapeutic products in Bill C-47.
Over 80% of natural health products consumers are women, while 90% of practitioners are women. Over 50% of the micro-businesses are female- or women-owned, and 84% of direct sellers are women. That is what the impact would be on the Canadian economy if we continue down this road of making the natural health products space uncompetitive. We would lose businesses in Canada.
Let me remind people where the starting point was. We were already the best regulated environment in the world. We did not need to do any of this in Bill C-47. We were the safest already. Over 80% of Canadians use natural health products. There were several audits done by the industry, by Deloitte and so on, that basically debunked all of the claims that Health Canada was making to justify what it was doing. It claimed it was for consumer protection, but the reality is that very few people, in any way, shape or form, are harmed by natural health products.
Where are we? We have more red tape, more costs and less choice for consumers. We are also in an environment right now where, south of the border, there are several states, such as Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina and Nevada, that are actively using tax incentives to draw health businesses into their areas of responsibility. In Canada, we have a 90-day personal use import system where anybody can order online and have their natural health products brought in from a non-Canadian jurisdiction with the same level of regulatory framework. Regulatory checks and pre-market approvals for sites and products all happen in Canada. That is why we have the gold standard when it comes to regulations.
That is not what our main competitor in the United States does at all. It has a post-market regulatory framework, which means that anybody who has a business in Canada and who is looking at the uncompetitive environment, and most of these business people are women, would be looking at the United States, saying that they could move their business down there, start manufacturing, have a tax incentive to do so and still ship to Canada. They would not have to deal with any of the burdens and red tape of pre-market approvals for a site or a product, and simply have some post-market regulations in the United States, but still ship to Canada without even any tariffs on those personal-use imports.
This is the environment we are facing here in Canada. It is one we should be very concerned about. We should be making sure that we do not overburden the Canadian space, because this market is worth $5.5 billion in products every year. That is over $200 million just in GST alone, and the cost of the natural health products directorate is only $50 million a year. This industry pays for itself in spades, and we are not even talking about the health benefits for Canadians, which keep them out of the allopathic health care system, or the regulated health care system, that we have here in Canada.
Really, it comes down to choice. Consumers want to be able to take care of themselves. Mothers want to take care of their families and their children. People are looking for alternative health care measures all of the time when the regular health care system is not providing them any relief.
Anybody who says that Health Canada does not have enough power right now is simply missing the point. As a matter of fact, the Auditor General has said that Health Canada was not already using the powers it had pre-Bill C-47. With its current powers, it can stop the sale of any natural health product it wants.
Health Canada has border powers for personal-use imports. If it chooses to change the regulations or do more to keep Canadians safe from health products that are coming in from offshore, it can do so. It can seize any product any time it wants. It can revoke a site licence from a manufacturer, a packager, a labeller or an importer any time it wants. It can mandate a label change, for example, to add a warning, to any of the manufacturers here in Canada. It can inspect any place that has a site licence any time it wants. It has already done so. It is called good manufacturing practices. It has that ability to do so. It can inspect any product off the shelf by sending it to a lab, doing an analysis and making sure the contents in the bottle match the contents on the label. It can revoke a natural product number.
These are the massive, sweeping powers that Health Canada already had prior to Bill C-47, so the arguments that Health Canada is using, that it needs massive new powers to keep Canadians safe, simply do not hold water.
I also want to expand on the fact that health products are now being regulated as therapeutic products, so the fine structures for therapeutic products now apply to health products. Some of these fines can be up to $5 million a day for non-compliance. This makes sense for a large global therapeutic or biomedical company, but it does not make sense for a mom-and-pop shop that is trying to create some new natural remedies or a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine.
This is a ridiculous change that simply did not need to happen. It puts a chill in the industry and a chill in investment. Nobody wants to operate or take any risks in that particular structure.
In closing, I want to thank Canadians from coast to coast who have written to parliamentarians and who have put pressure on their MPs. I will just advise them that they need to continue to do that because there will be a vote on this. I know that we need to make the changes to get natural health products back to their traditional definition and classification. We need colleagues to get this bill to committee so that we can go through it again.
I urge everybody to listen to Canadians. It is time to have some true consultation on this process. I want to thank all of the industry association reps, Natural Health Product Protection Association, the Canadian Health Food Association and everybody else who has lobbied so hard to protect these vital, important businesses and this vital, important space for Canadians.
