Thank you for inviting me here today.
My name is Joel Thuna. I'm a fourth-generation master herbalist and the general manager of Pure-lē Canada, my family's small business. We directly employ 10 people in our building, and we indirectly help employ many more Canadians through our distributors, brokers, farmers and supplier network, which is in every province. For 135 years, my family has manufactured what are now called NHPs in Canada. We are a compliant company with over 500 product licences.
In my 50 years in the industry, I have seen the landscape change time and again. I testified before this very committee 26 years ago regarding the inappropriateness of Canada's regulations that treated NHPs as drugs. This committee consulted with Canadians and issued a report, “Natural Health Products: A New Vision”. In 1999, the Liberal government's Minister of Health, Allan Rock, announced that the report and all of its recommendations had been accepted by this House.
The report's guiding principles included the following:
...NHPs are different in nature from and must not be treated strictly as either food or pharmaceutical products....
NHP regulations must not unduly restrict access by consumers....
NHP regulations must not place inappropriate cost on industry, consumers and government....
Information regarding decisions and the regulatory system must be readily available to NHP stakeholders.
As an industry, we had high hopes that the resulting legislation and regulations would, once and for all, be appropriate to NHPs. The NHPD was set up. Through wide consultation, Canada achieved the enviable. We had laws and regulations that protected consumers and gave them access to the products they wanted, all with industry buy-in. Businesses were licensed and products required pre-market licensing. Repeatedly, we heard that Canada had regulations that were the envy of the world.
Over the past four years, multiple laws and regulations have been introduced without meaningful consultation or proper economic impact assessment. This patchwork system is causing me and my colleagues to question the viability of Canada's NHP sector. I was asked to estimate the cost to my small business. We estimated the first-year cost to exceed $500,000, with annual costs exceeding $300,000. These days, no small family business can survive with these additional costs.
Classifying NHPs as drugs is inappropriate. One complication of this is putting NHPs under Vanessa's Law. This is using a jackhammer to swat a fruit fly. Existing measures, such as inspection, stop-sale, seizure and licence suspension, are rarely used. Regulation without enforcement is meaningless. Health Canada has the power to suspend licences, if required. Industry is happy to consult on appropriate regulations for recall.
New requirements for drug labelling are to come into force. These regulations do not provide any new information to consumers, but rather make the packages confusing and increase costs that are going to be passed on to consumers. Additionally, these regulations will reduce the likelihood of package recycling, needlessly increasing our industry's carbon footprint.
Foreign actors see that the easiest and cheapest route for Canadians is through the personal use importation framework. A significant portion of Canadians now buy product not captured under Health Canada regulations, exposing themselves to unacceptable risks. In the past, I have questioned Health Canada: If a product is potentially harmful, how is it potentially harmful only when manufactured in Canada but not when imported? The big sticking point I have is that Canadian companies are investing to be compliant yet losing a lot of money and jobs. Canadians who buy NHPs outside Canada are bringing in a combination of products they can't get here and products they can. They do this to reduce their shipping costs. This is destroying Canada's retailers. Do you understand the depth of the problem? There are foreign companies with warehouses in Canada for their non-licensed products, so customers can get fast, no-border-issues shipments. This means no tax revenue and no Health Canada oversight.
In the end, Canadians want what they have today: access to safe, well-made products. Bill C-368, along with extensive and meaningful stakeholder consultation prior to new regulation and law introduction, is a good starting point to bring Canada back to the guiding principles that are supposed to guide all legislation and regulations for NHPs.