Thank you.
Thank you to my colleagues for the unanimous consent.
I'll bring this to issue to a close.
I think the putative reasons given for this should be passed after that process, but to use a bit of a pejorative, slipping it in a budget bill is not the proper way to legislate. These powers amount to “let the minister do whatever they want if they think it's needed”. That is not an appropriate way to legislate powers, no matter how salutary or desirable the examples given might be.
For those reasons, particularly when we talk about products that go through a very rigorous process of being approved in Canada by Health Canada, this would allow the minister to exempt that, or to approve it if the FDA said yes or if any product is used off-label.
We had a little tiny flavour of the implications of legislating an area of off-label use. We know that many health professionals, from physicians to traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, use products off-label all the time, and they are regulated. They're regulated by the provinces and they're regulated by their professional bodies. To allow one minister of the Crown the discretion to change that on his or her belief, even if they're not certain, is not a wise legislative process. I just want to set that out.
I have some amendments. Perversely, I'm going to be seeking to amend these sections, and then I'll be voting against them. The reason for doing that is that, if they are going to pass—and I don't know what my colleagues are going to ultimately decide on this—then I at least want some guardrails and parameters in these sections. However, I will be urging my colleagues to vote against these sections because they are just far too broad and there just aren't sufficient guardrails.
My last point will be this: I heard the Minister of Health say that no health minister would use these powers in an unreasonable or irresponsible way. As the Muslims say, “Trust in Allah, but tether your camel.” I don't trust that. I don't think we should rely on giving unlimited unilateral powers to a single cabinet minister on the assumption that they will just never do it.
I could take a bit of a critical shot and say that I sat on the health committee with people who may be potential health ministers in this country in the future. I'm not so sure I would want to give powers to them—not these broad powers.
This is where I will conclude. People will remember when we had shortages, say, of childhood pain medication, like acetaminophen. We had shortages of ventilators, and we had shortages in this country of baby formula. There are ways that exist now in cabinet to use emergency measures, but there are two important guardrails. One is that it gets the approval of cabinet. The second guardrail is that those emergency measures are time-derated. Those are two important guardrails that exist now and I think ought to be at least considered if we're going to be making a change to that. I don't see those guardrails in this legislation.
Thank you for indulging me. I have only a few things I'm going to speak to in this budget. This is one of them, so I wanted to give a fulsome explanation of why I'm concerned about this area while being very sympathetic to the underlying issues that appear to underpin it.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.