Madam Speaker, that is the second time that has happened to me.
I know I need to calm down, but speeches like that make no sense. I worked full-time for over two weeks with legal experts to come up with three small amendments. The member for Ponoka—Didsbury made it clear that the first amendment has been incorporated into Bill C‑224, but there were two others. These two other amendments addressed the concerns raised by some stakeholders, particularly Health Canada.
Do members know what the Auditor General's report revealed? It revealed that, since 2014, Health Canada has been unable to enforce its natural health products regulations. That is what it revealed. The Auditor General analyzed 75 of the industry's 91,000 natural health products. The Auditor General knew that these 75 products were already problematic and wanted to be able to tell Health Canada to do its job. In a panic, Health Canada decided to use an omnibus bill to introduce Bill C‑47 in an appendix. This bill purportedly championed consumer safety, but it threatened to kill an industry.
Consumers must be able to make free and informed choices, but there must be products available for them to make free and informed choices about. When we talk about natural health products, we are not talking about large multinationals. We are talking about small and medium-sized businesses.
Having cost-recovery provisions that allow the work to get done properly is not a problem. The problem is that Health Canada went for the simplest solution possible. It took the cost recovery and penalties model that it uses for pharmaceuticals and applied it to natural health products. Need I remind the House that the pharmaceutical industry has 20-year patents? The same cannot be said of the natural health products industry. Need I also remind the House that there are no taxes on pharmaceutical products, unlike natural health products? The government takes in enough money to pay for a proper oversight system.
This is what shocks me the most. I did my job, and I have kept in touch with all the groups. The industry is not at all resistant to change. What it wants is a system that allows it to survive over the long term. However, it also wants to rid its system of bad actors. The natural health products regulations were supposed to be ironclad.
We decided that we needed to go a step further. First, nicotine must be kept within the therapeutic products category. All nicotine-based products are therapies for quitting smoking. Nicotine is a highly addictive drug. That is what we did with the first amendment. That was also what the government and the minister at the time wanted. We presented that.
In the second Bloc Québécois amendment, we ensured that the minister would have the power to order a recall, even though he has all the powers under the regulations. Need I remind members that recalls were voluntary? There have never been any alarming cases of people being resistant to recalls. We protected the minister's right to order recalls, which was already provided for under the regulations.