Health Committee on May 7th, 2026

[Kim Steele]

Absolutely. At Best Medicines Coalition, we're fortunate to sit on the drug shortages committee that Health Canada has, as well as the multi-sector stakeholder table, and we talk about those things there.

We really need to be able to monitor in real time, especially with some of the challenges we're seeing coming out of U.S. drug policy. I will say this. Of the 17 companies that had signed on to the invitation to bring their supplies to the U.S. and do some manufacturing, some of those—many of them, or all of them—are making medicines that we need here in Canada.

I think one of our challenges as a country is ensuring that we're looking at what's coming into Canada but also sharing data on what we have and what we don't have at local pharmacies, communities and hospitals. I know that in the rare disease space, with cystic fibrosis, often our pharmacists are having to mix medicines and compound things because they can't get the medicines they need for their patients.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Who is best suited to take charge of gathering and managing that information?

[Kim Steele]

That's a big question. There are many sources of information.

Canada’s Drug Agency recently did some work on patient registries through the national strategy for drugs for rare diseases. There's a lot of rich registry data that's available on patient outcomes. We can see where drugs have been in shortage and where they might affect patient outcomes in some aspects.

I think it's a collaboration. I think there's a leadership role here for the federal government. Our provinces and territories all have their own systems. Through the health care agreements that we have in place, in terms of some of the bilateral agreements, there's a lot of good stuff going on, but we have to continue to work collaboratively and all shine and do the work we're meant to do.

One of the big challenges that we face is that there's not always great integration between our systems. These registries—some of them, like ours, are 50 years old—are not tapped into. There's a lot of data that we just aren't leveraging in this country.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

In your submission to the committee, you mentioned that the BMC has called for proactive federal monitoring of drug supply risks. What would this look like in practice?

[Kim Steele]

We already do some of that monitoring. What we need to do, again, are these collaborative efforts. Health Canada does a great job of monitoring some of the drugs that are getting caught up at the border, if you will, and are not getting into the country, and it monitors delays. However, we still need to have that domestic capacity to monitor from the inside and be able to report up and report down.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you very much.

Before I go to the next speaker, I would like to welcome Madam Ginette Lavack to the committee. Unfortunately, I will not be able to give you speaking time. The only way you will be able to vote is if your camera is on and you give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. That's it. I hope you got what I meant.

Madame Lavack, you have to open your camera to be part of the committee. It's up to the whip's office now to deal with it.

Mr. Blanchette-Joncas, please go ahead for six minutes.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Chair, I want to welcome the witnesses who are with us today.

My first question is for Mr. Lévesque.

Are you familiar with the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector task force, the working group the federal government set up in March 2026 to improve Canada's competitiveness and access to innovative drugs?

[Stéphane Lévesque]

Unfortunately, no, I'm not, but I'd love to be on it.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

I'm sure you would, but there's more.

The government posted information about the task force online, on its website, but didn't say who the members were. I, as a parliamentarian, asked the government why it didn't think it relevant to say who the members of the task force were.

I finally got the membership list. On the task force are representatives from Pfizer Canada, AbbVie, Innovative Medicines Canada, Roche Canada, Merck Canada, Novartis, Aramis Biotechnologies, AstraZeneca, CSL Seqirus, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Moderna, Gilead, GSK Canada, BioCanRx, Canada's Drug Agency, Aspect Biosystems, Amgen, Takeda and Boehringer Ingelheim.

Most of them are from multinational drug companies.

Do you think Quebec and Canadian drug makers who manufacture here are sufficiently represented on the task force, to achieve what the government is trying to achieve: improve access to medicines, reduce costs, create jobs and boost the economy?

[Stéphane Lévesque]

They are actually very good companies. I'm not here to bash them, but it does raise some questions. Where do the real Canadian-owned pharmaceutical companies fit in? Unfortunately, none of the companies you named is Canadian-owned.

To put things into perspective, I'll tell you a story from the pandemic. You don't know this, but we were two weeks away from running out of rocuronium, an anaesthetic used for surgery. A call went out to the drug makers, but all those big pharmaceutical companies told us their supply was bound for other jurisdictions, not Canada. It's as simple as that.

A Quebec company thought that was crazy and stepped up to find some. It was able to secure an emergency supply from the U.S. Without that Canadian company, we would've been in big trouble.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Lévesque, I commend you for telling us that story. It's important information for the public and the committee members to have. I think we want the same thing: reliable, sustainable access to drugs.

I told you the name of the task force the government set up to identify solutions. Can the group really find solutions when it has too few domestic manufacturers and generic drug makers? In fact, it doesn't have any. I haven't even told you who the patient and physician representatives are. That was just the manufacturers.

What do you think of that?

[Stéphane Lévesque]

The issue isn't that there are too few of us on the task force. It's that we aren't on it at all, plain and simple. That's all I have to say about that.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Do you think there's a risk that a group predominantly made up of big multinationals will prioritize access to innovative drugs over domestic manufacturing capacity?

[Stéphane Lévesque]

I don't see it as a risk. That is in fact their priority, but it won't meet the needs of Canadians come the next pandemic or other such event.

We're here talking about sovereignty. That's part of the big picture. As I said earlier, we need to think about those major innovators, but we also need to think about Canadian-owned manufacturers.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Lévesque, you took the words right out of my mouth.

Putting this into perspective, I want to know whether we can really talk about pharmaceutical sovereignty when we're not inviting domestic manufacturers to the table.

[Stéphane Lévesque]

I think the answer is obvious.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Thank you. If you could confirm that for the record, I think it would be helpful for certain people.

[Stéphane Lévesque]

Yes, I confirm it.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

You also spoke about Health Canada's review and marketing authorization timelines. These timelines are undermining the competitiveness of Canadian manufacturers in relation to American manufacturers.

Can you tell us more about this?

[Stéphane Lévesque]

I've been the general manager for 10 years. Not only has there been no improvement, but things are getting worse each year. The time frame keeps getting longer year after year, despite the implementation of the cost recovery system supposedly put in place to ensure that more people could review the submitted files. Unfortunately, we aren't seeing that effect.

We're now trying to take things a step further by drawing on the recommendations from other countries, or on approvals granted in other countries, to secure pre‑approvals in Canada. The process can move faster when you receive approval in other places than when you're a Canadian company that sells primarily in the Canadian market.

Canadian companies are being penalized at the expense of international companies. We'll see some serious dumping. I'm warning you right now. We've seen this happen with biocides. I also acted as a witness during the discussions on a regulatory framework for biocides. I warned everyone at the time. I said that we needed to be careful. We were handing the keys to the house over to the United States. We accepted one country—in this case the United States—with regard to biocides. Now we're stuck with it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll move to the second round. We will start with Mr. Bailey for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to thank all the witnesses today.

Ms. Parmar, I want to thank you for all the work you've done with the Canadian Health Food Association. Although I wasn't in Parliament as an MP while the campaign to save the supplements was ongoing, I've heard from colleagues, both MPs and staff, that it was one of the largest letter campaigns ever, if not the largest, to protest the draconian Liberal legislation that directly targeted the natural health product industry in this country.

How can the government claim to want to protect Canadian sovereignty, strengthen domestic supply chains and lower our reliance on other markets when an industry like natural health products has been undermined and attacked for so long by this Liberal government?

[Sonia Parmar]

I think that the government put through a lot of regulatory and legislative changes that propose that we look more like drugs.

In your previous question, you asked us about whether that was appropriate and whether we need our own framework. We absolutely do. I would say that the over-regulation that we experienced, to the effect that small and medium-sized businesses would potentially have to pay up to $60,000 for an innovative product, was definitely something that catapulted our campaign. That's not to mention changes with Vanessa's Law, which changed the definition of natural health products overnight to pharmaceutical drugs, on top of very expensive labelling changes.

In the face of, essentially, survival, we definitely had to launch the “Save our Supplements” campaign for that exact reason.

As as I sit here today explaining how important preventative care is and how important natural health products are to that discussion, I will underline that it is very difficult to say that Canada can be sovereign if it isn't taking care of the fundamental, everyday natural health products that Canadians use to maintain their own health.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

I'm going to kind of piggyback on a couple of questions that my colleague asked. I'm going to re-ask this: Why has the government left this commercial back door open?

[Sonia Parmar]

I don't know that it's been intentionally left open, per se. It is not just natural health products that are targeted. It's actually broader. It's also medical devices and pharmaceutical products.

Personal importation was originally intended for snowbirds. It's for people travelling, for example, to Florida or other places, who get prescribed something and bring it back. I think that, especially since COVID hit, commercialization of this loophole has been used essentially to commercialize electronic or online sales. This has really catapulted us into a very difficult situation for our sector in particular. Many Canadians pay taxes on these products. They're not cheap. They're looking for cheaper options, so they go online and take potential risks without necessarily even recognizing that a lot of these companies are American and not Canadian. A lot of them have “.ca” websites.

I do think that Health Canada has a big job to do to continue to inform Canadians, to help close that loophole and to make sure that Canadian regulations for natural health product manufacturers are fair in Canada. As I said, we're the only country to actually have a very onerous premarket approval system. It may take three years for our products to get to market, whereas in the States it could take three weeks.

There are a lot of angles to it, but I think a lot of it is unintentional.