Health Food Industry Crisis
Here in a nutshell is a superb article by Peter Helgason on the health food industry. While this refers to the Canadian situation it encapsulates, in short order, the struggles between the British legacy system and the globlist agenda the European (Napoleonic Code) and is a must read...
The article will also provide the current update on Bill 420. An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act
Chris Gupta
See also:
Fighting Globalism with Common Law
Alternative Medicine Unwittingly Being Used In The Battle To Restrict Access To Nutrients
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Canadian Health Food Industry Crisis (The original is here without embellishments of course.)
Peter Helgason
The Canadian health food industry is facing a crisis. As consumers, retailers, distributors and manufacturers, we have been duped into a losing game of progressive incrementalism. Dangling carrots of "approved claims" and "increased consumer confidence", a succession of federal governments have fronted an odious policy from the senior levels of the Health Canada bureaucracy, a policy that has had the reverse effect.The "unmoved mover" behind the policy is the bureaucratic zeal to bind Canada to international standards, promulgated by international agencies, whose existence and power are directly proportional to their capacity to benefit global industry.
The reality for the plutocrats who seek to destroy our domestic health food business is that our legal system is stacked against them. In our British legacy system, we have a "black list" system of regulation: unless it is specifically forbidden it is allowed, with legal remedies if the restriction is deemed by the courts as arbitrary or impinging upon our God-given rights.
Our bureaucrats want us to "harmonize" our regulations with the irreconcilable, European (Napoleonic Code) "white list" system: unless it is specifically allowed, it is forbidden, with no right of appeal as your rights are a gift from the state, not a birthright.
The new policy is always "just about ready" and promises pie-in-the sky rewards for the health food industry and consumer alike. In reality, the situation always gets worse. Small manufacturers, overwhelmed with regulatory burden, fail. Products disappear from shelves. Consumer choice is limited. Importers wind up competing against grey-market, same-label goods at discount prices because not all importers follow the same rules. Enforcement is uneven.
In June of 1997, Freedom of Choice in Health Care filed suit against Health Canada in Ontario Provincial Court. It was challenging Health Canada's imposition of Site Licensing Fees on the manufacturers of health foods. It argued that Health Canada bureaucrats could not impose a new tax based on regulation, and that only parliament had the power to tax. This forced the Chrétien government to rethink its position, ultimately withdrawing the proposed regulation and embarking on one of the federal government's largest ever public consultations.
The Standing Committee on Health held public meetings from coast to coast; MPs heard directly from hundreds of stakeholders and received more than one million "sincere constituent contacts" and hundreds of thousands of petitions supporting personal freedom of choice in the use of health foods.
This led to the publication of the New Vision report and the subsequent Transition Team Report and the establishment of the Office of Natural Health (ONHP), currently known as the Natural Health Products Directorate (NHPD). Although the report is long on detail and covers many issues addressed by the existing regulatory scheme, one of the main recommendations is the striking down of Schedule A and Section 3.1 and 3.2 of the Food and Drug Act. (Schedule A is a list of about 40 diseases and Sections 3.1 and 3.2 make it an offence to advertise or sell to the general public any product that prevents, treats or cures any of the diseases listed on Schedule A.)
The other main point of the report is that health foods should be regulated differently than drugs and that any regulation recognize the product's "wide margins of safety" and the freedom of informed individuals to have free access to the products of their choice for self-care.
In December of 2001, the Proposed Regulatory Framework for the regulation of health foods, which, with no legislative authority, it referred to as Natural Health Products, was published in the Canada Gazette. The proposed regulatory scheme was universally attacked as a betrayal of the Standing Committee report and even of the significantly watered down 53 Recommendations which were purported to summarize the New Vision report.
After more than a year of foot-dragging and fighting on the part of Health Canada, Private Members Bill C-420 was given first reading in the House in March of 2003. The bill sought to do by legislation what the bureaucrats were stifling. Namely, to treat the products more like food and get rid of sections 3.1 and 3.2. Grudgingly, an amended Gazette was published in June 2003 and an impossible task, a task designed to fail, was shouldered by the under-funded, under-staffed NHPD.
Steady parliamentary pressure and scrutiny was applied to the Health Canada's corporate cabal and in a testament to widespread parliamentary dissatisfaction, Bill C-420 passed second reading by a well-briefed House in October of 2003, with all-party support and hundreds of thousands of petitions.
With the June 2004 election, C-420 died on the order paper, but was reintroduced in Paul Martin's new parliament and given unanimous consent at second reading to go to committee and resolve the many outstanding issues with the rapidly failing new regulatory scheme.
In the spring of 2005, the Health Committee conducted formal hearings on Bill C-420 (again supported by tens of thousands of petitions) and held witness days for stakeholders, experts and scholars. With the exception of some bureaucrats, there was near universal condemnation of Schedule A and Sections 3.1 and 3.2. The bureaucratic canard that getting rid of this clearly anti-freedom section of the act would open the door for willy nilly, US-style prescription drug advertising was demonstrated to be fraudulent.
As the fall 2005 session progressed, an historic compromise was reached at Health Committee: Senior Health Canada bureaucrats and all parties reached a compromise position on Bill C-420.
Given the complexity of the issues – international trade agreements, NAFTA, Codex, WTO, Sections 91, 92, jurisdiction issues, repeating the whole process in the Senate, etc – it was decided that administratively depopulating Schedule A and leaving Sections 3.1 and 3.2 as "orphans," which referenced nothing, was a practical solution. This compromise was published in the Gazette in November 2005 as Project 1474.
With the change in government in January 2006 and the oversight of the three previous parliaments that were shuffled to new positions, defeated or overwhelmed by new priorities, Project 1474 languished in limbo. This occurred even though "Canada's New Government" committed itself to a more commonsense approach and greater access to health food in their election platform.
Health Canada's bureaucrats, who have always hated "disinfecting sunlight and parliamentary oversight" killed 1474 with foot dragging and replaced it with their own version of reality in March of 2007. Project 1539, which spits in the face of parliament, the Canadian people and the concept of personal freedom, proposes to embark on yet more endless discussion about the already resolved reality that any restriction of the rights of Canadian's freedom of expression can only be done by including the "notwithstanding" language as referenced in both the Bill of Rights and the Charter.
Schedule A is not an ŕ la carte menu. Its existence is a clear violation of our collective rights as defined by the courts, a position expressed in writing in October of 2002 by then Deputy Minister of Justice (now Deputy Minister of Health) Morris Rosenberg to then Minister of Health Anne McLellan.
While not perfect, Project 1474 was the culmination of 10 years of careful, comprehensive work and most everyone affected (with the exception of the bureaucrats) fully endorsed the amendments to the regulations as a positive step that would make Canada a healthier and freer society.
As a relatively frequent traveller to Ottawa, I get to speak with many parliamentarians. I think the confusion about the situation we find ourselves in today is summed up very well by an off-the-cuff comment by a former cabinet minister I spoke to in late May, "What is the problem with this health food stuff anyway? We, the parliamentarians, all use it, half the Senate lives on it. If there was a problem we'd be seeing it here."
I think it's safe to assume the problems aren't health related.
Peter Helgason is president of Friends of Freedom International, VP Regulatory Affairs of the Alliance of Natural Suppliers, and works for Strauss Herb Company in Kamloops, BC.
posted by Chris Gupta on Monday July 9 2007
URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2007/07/09/health_food_industry_crisis.htm
