Health Committee on Oct. 29th, 2024

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you, Minister. Once again, I'll move along, because you clearly have no clue how many Canadian seniors are hospitalized every year due to pharmaceutical products, which again is under your purview.

Would you care to answer that on behalf of Canadians? It's a simple answer. If you don't want to, if you don't know the answer, it's okay.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

What I'm not going to do is engage in an attempt to not talk about this bill. You have not asked any questions related to this bill, because you don't want to talk about how deadly this bill is—

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you very much, Minister.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

—and about the fact that you would leave products on the shelf that are dangerous to Canadians' health.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

I'll interrupt you there.

The difficulty is, Minister, that 13,000 Canadians are harmed by pharmaceutical products every year. There were 13,000 seniors hospitalized. People need a reference.

All you want to do is talk down to Canadians about feces and lead, with all of your fantastical words. That's what you're attempting to do.

Minister, I have a very simple question. How much does the NHP industry contribute to the GDP of Canada on a yearly basis?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Enormously. It is a booming, multi-billion dollar industry.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Just give a number, Minister.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Am I allowed to answer the question in the same time that he took to ask the question?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Yes. You have another 25 seconds to answer the question.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Thank you.

It is a booming industry. It's a growing industry. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. One of the things that will protect that industry is ensuring that the industry is afforded the protection of being able to recall bad products—

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you very much, Minister. Your time is up.

Once again, I'll ask you just for the number—

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Mr. Chair, do I still have 10 seconds?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Yes, go ahead.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

You're talking about the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals and the idea that there are adverse effects of pharmaceuticals, so do you not do anything about natural health products? Do you just leave the people who have adverse effects from natural health products with nothing?

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

It's interesting how you draw your own conclusions.

That being said, because of your negative effects on the natural health product industry, how many businesses are saying they're considering shuttering operations in Canada?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Vanessa's Law does not affect any compliant business or any business attempting to be compliant at all. The cost for businesses that are compliant or attempting to be compliant is exactly zero dollars.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you very much, Minister.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Minister.

Thank you, Dr. Ellis. That's your time.

Mr. Naqvi, go ahead for six minutes.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Mr. Chair, I have another point of order.

The Conservative Party had six minutes. It's now 11:25. I want to remind the committee that we had scheduled an hour with the minister, and I want us to have an hour with him. I want it established now. I have serious questions for him, and I want to be able to ask them. I'd like us to be able to have the minister for an hour. There are about 25 minutes left in the meeting. We need a commitment from the minister to stay for an hour for questions and answers. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Mr. Naqvi, please go ahead for six minutes.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Minister, thank you for being here.

I am quite interested in this bill. I've done a fair bit of research on this bill, and I'm really concerned about its impact on the health and well-being of Canadians.

Let me just start by making it very clear and by hearing from you directly that this bill does not cover the issues around labelling and cost recovery. It only covers the issue dealing with the recall of products that are unsafe for Canadians. Am I correct?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Yes. That's along with the ability to use precision regulating powers to deal with things like what we did with nicotine replacement therapy or what I was talking about with pseudoephedrine as a precursor to meth, as an example.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Given the very focused purpose behind this bill, Bill C-368, what concerns do you have if this were to be passed into law? How, in your view, is it going to increase the risk to the health of Canadians?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

This is an absolute threat to the health of Canadians. This bill is a terrible, awful bill. Look, I get it. If I were a Conservative, I wouldn't want to ask questions or to talk about it either.

Here's the problem. I've gone through the example of the rat feces and the urine, but let me go through some others. Let's talk about a young woman, in 2021, who was taking natural health products that had unacceptable levels of lead. They should have no lead. It led to her being poisoned. This really endangered this person's health. I talked about this vitamin D case, also in 2021, with undisclosed levels of vitamin D. A teenager was hospitalized for 10 days. I just pick these out as some of the 772 serious adverse effects from 2021 to 2023; that's a two-year period.

No one is disputing the importance of natural health products. They're incredibly important, and they should be available to Canadians.

What does it mean when it says “made in Canada”? It means you can trust it. It means that you're not going to leave something on the shelf that's contaminated by rat feces or contaminated by fibreglass or contaminated by lead. The idea that we would take away our ability to recall that would be frightening to most Canadians.

One of my objectives is to pull this out of the subreddits, where this has been lingering, where there's a lot of false information, and to pull it out into the light of day. I am certain that most Canadians would be horrified at what this bill would do.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I know my Conservative friends love to talk about common sense. At a common-sense level, with the current law, Vanessa's Law, if the product is unsafe, it allows Health Canada, from a compliance perspective, to be able to take that harmful product off the shelves, so that somebody who's looking for that product is not able to use it because it will be detrimental to their health. That's something Canadians expect of their government, and that's what Vanessa's Law does.