No, that's okay.
Again, we spent hours of our own time, in our own office, looking at this database and trying to substantiate the ridiculous claims of the Health Canada officials. Because of the nature of the database, it is impossible to do that. This was the first reason we are moving a motion to compel purporters of claims to actually table that information. That's why it's so important and why that motion was very specific in what it asked for.
The second instance we had—I know I mentioned this before, but I think it's important to put this all in one package—was of Dr. Supriya Sharma being here at the same time as the original omnibus bill. She claimed that a child died, sadly, in Alberta as a result of natural health products. It pains me to bring this up again, but it's such an egregious and untrue claim that it bears repeating. The child died, if I'm not mistaken, of viral meningitis. For a physician to be here as a representative of the government, working with Health Canada, and say that the child died due to natural health products when it is absolutely untrue is shameful, I think. I was going to call it a lie, but I'm not going to. I'm just going to say that it's absolutely untrue. It's absolutely shameful.
Then we came back because our great friend, who happens to be here at the table today, realized the classification of natural health products as therapeutic products is what allows this cascade of ridiculous events, meaning that therapeutic products will be required to have significant labelling changes with tiny fonts, increased use of plastics and labels that are going to fall off because they're so huge. As well, the cost recovery program can also be enacted, very much contrary to comments from Minister Holland, who said the change in definition wouldn't change all those things. However, it is the change in definition that allows all those things to happen.
We also heard, of course, representatives from the anti-smoking and anti-nicotine group who came here. They suggested that nicotine should not be part of the natural health products regime. They wanted to specifically fight the bill based on that. When you begin to look at that.... You know, there are easy ways to make things happen in terms of removing products that contain nicotine from the natural health product legislation.
The other group that was here, as I mentioned already, was ISMP. They mentioned there had been 700 claims of side effects related to natural health products since 2019. They were again very unclear in what they presented. One of the claims, if I remember correctly—again, I looked at the footage—was that somebody read the label wrong, got the wrong product and was upset because they couldn't get a refund.
Now, I don't think that is a side effect of natural health products. That's a side effect of not reading properly. That's my own opinion. All the way to their egregious claims of multiple deaths....
Again, why is this important? It is important because people should not be able to come here and make egregious claims without data to support what they are saying. We even had a physician from SickKids here saying that multiple children died because of natural health products but who, once again, refused to provide any cases. I asked that physician specifically, “How many children died, what did they die from and what was the toxic substance?”, etc., and there was no answer provided.
It is a comedy of events. They're not even errors, and it's certainly not funny that people come here and make egregious claims against the natural health product industry and nobody besides the Conservatives and the Bloc wants to hold them to account. The NDP-Liberal coalition wants to adjourn debate on this specific motion. Clearly, they do not want to have this information before committee.