Cross-Canada Tour to Ensure Access to Natural Health Products Set for Oct. 4

A Canada-wide tour to advocate for reversal of new regulations for natural health products is set to launch in October. 

The tour, put together by the Natural Health Product Protection Association (NHPPA), begins Oct. 4 in Victoria and makes several stops en-route to Ottawa, where the organizers intend to submit a petition and a “Charter of Health Freedom.” The organization says its petition will be presented in the House of Commons by Conservative MP Blaine Calkins.

The tour includes two other groups travelling from the Maritimes and Quebec, as well as a flight from Whitehorse, with the goal of converging at the nation’s capital on Oct. 25. 

When the federal government passed Bill C-47 in 2023, Health Canada was given more jurisdiction for the oversight and regulation of natural health products (NHPs). This included a redefinition of therapeutics, the authority to impose increased fees and testing protocols, and the discretion to levy considerably larger fines for non-compliance.

According to the president and founder of the NHPPA, the changes could mean “life or death” for many consumers of natural health products if the products they rely on become more restricted or expensive. 

“We’re talking between being totally disabled and being perfectly healthy,” Shawn Buckley, a constitutional lawyer and founder and president of NHPPA, said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Buckley said any problems associated with NHPs are so small, they are statistically irrelevant, arguing that Health Canada is focusing on the small number of complaints while ignoring the rewards.

“The purpose of the tour is to break the narrative, and show Canadians that there’s tremendous benefits,” he said. “To showcase the fact that we’re over-regulated and this is leading to poor health outcomes. We’re in a health crisis. We’re getting sicker and sicker, and there’s literally millions of us who have found relief in the natural health community. Why can’t we have an honest conversation about this?”

Buckley says if the proposed health charter is enacted into law, it would guarantee Canadians access to NHPs.

“It basically sets out the health rights that the courts already say we have,” he said. “So it’s not creating a single new right, but it says, ‘here are rights all Canadians have. And these rights take precedence over everything else.’”

Calkins introduced Bill C-224, An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act concerning natural health products, as a private members’ bill in May to reverse changes to the regulation of NHPs imposed by Bill C-47. The Epoch Times attempted to confirm with Calkins whether he will be presenting NHPPA’s petition in the House of Commons, but did not immediately hear back. 

Health Canada’s Position

Health Canada says some NHPs pose risks to consumers by neglecting to follow established protocols. This includes using ingredients not approved by the agency or listing them on the labels, promoting safety when known health risks have been documented, or by adding prescription drugs to a product while continuing to advertise it as “natural.”

The Epoch Times contacted Health Canada for comment, but was told the agency would need several days to respond, and could not answer before press time.

Health Canada’s website lists several examples where the agency says products that were listed as “natural” actually posed a threat.

“The adulteration of health products that are promoted as ‘natural’ but contain prescription and non-prescription drugs have become a worldwide problem, especially those promoted for weight loss, body building, erectile dysfunction, sleep problems, inflammatory conditions and treatment of diabetes,” the agency says.

“Health Canada helps to make sure Canadians have ready access to NHPs that are safe, effective and of high quality. As part of this work, Health Canada assesses the benefits and risks of natural health products, monitors and assesses side effects (adverse reactions), and communicates information about risks to health professionals and the public.”

One of the most notable legislative changes was made to the Protecting Canadians from Unsafe Drugs Act, commonly referred to as Vanessa’s Law, by adding NHPs to the act. The changes also grant Health Canada more power to impose recalls, mandate labelling requirements, and act more quickly when it identifies serious or imminent health risks.

Since C-47 became law two years ago, there have been few public reports of disciplinary action by Health Canada in the natural health industry.

In cases where Ottawa did intervene, one example was Richmond, B.C.’s Herbaland Naturals Inc., which had its licence to sell natural products revoked because the business “was unable to meet the regulatory requirements of the Natural Health Products Regulations,” according to a Health Canada statement in 2024. The company was reinstated in February 2025.

In another example from May 2024, Health Canada restricted the sales of all NHPs containing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine as their only medical ingredients, and restricted sales to pharmacists or those under their supervision.

‘It Was a Miracle’

The discussion on regulating NHPs has been vibrant for more than a decade. In a 2014 article in The Conversation, author and university lecturer Susan Walters, who holds a PhD in pharmacy, outlined the challenges regulators face when trying to assess natural products.

“Alternative medicines are considered to incur the lowest risk to consumers, subject to defined criteria, and so receive little scrutiny compared with prescription medicines,” she wrote.

“Consider St John’s Wort, which is a relatively well-studied herb. There have been a number of clinical studies about its efficacy and the Cochrane Collaboration has done a review that notes: ‘St John’s Wort products available on the market vary to a great extent.’ And that’s the heart of the problem—the herb’s chemical composition varies with its country of origin, harvest time, method of processing, the part of the plant the sample is sourced from, and how long the harvested plant was stored before use in manufacture.”

Regardless of the varying testing standards St. John’s wort may have faced and how its effectiveness has been determined, Marian Laderoute, who holds a PhD in immunology, credits the herb with restoring her health.

Laderoute, who lives in in Gatineau, Que., says she developed fatigue, insomnia, and brain fog after receiving an HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) injection in December 1993. She says her symptoms worsened over time and she became depressed and considered suicide. Then an acquaintance recommended St. John’s wort.

“It gave me my life back,” she said in an interview, “and it was a miracle.”

“By the time I actually got to see a world-specialist in chronic fatigue syndrome, he could not believe I found a treatment that works. He was saying, ‘You found a treatment? Everybody knows there’s no treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome.’ So I just thought that was kind of crazy, a world-expert saying that to me after I went through all this and discovered my own care.”

Alan Cassels is a pharmaceutical drug policy researcher and author of several books based in Victoria, B.C. While his expertise is in pharmaceutical regulations and he is only now studying the inclusion of NHPs into Health Canada’s oversight, he doesn’t see the value of combining the two under the same umbrella.

“How the pharmaceutical industry works is that in order for them to maintain a market, they have to develop a patent, and that patent involves processing, drug discovery, and all kinds of regulatory hurdles,” he said.

“Health Canada is trying to apply the same rules that govern pharmaceutical regulation to natural health products, and it doesn’t make sense. Companies will never be able to get a patent on St. John’s wort, for example, because they are natural products. So they can’t get patents. Therefore, they don’t have huge profits that they can invest in the kinds of clinical trials and stuff that the drug manufacturers can.”

Cassels agrees NHPs need a regulatory body to ensure phony or mislabelled products don’t enter the Canadian market, but fears using the pharmaceutical model will destroy the industry because of the added regulatory burden and costs.

Cassels also said that if the new regulations increase barriers to approval of the products “a lot of these companies are going to go out of business.”

However, Melissa Sheldrick, patient and family adviser at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada, said increased regulations allow consumers to have greater trust in the products offered and ensure safety.

“Consumers have to do their own research about the products they buy, which can be difficult for many Canadians. It can also be challenging to do this research at the point of selection,” Sheldrick told MPs during a parliamentary committee meeting in October 2023 before the new law was enacted.

“The changes recommended by Health Canada will result in key steps towards addressing the concerns reported by consumers and health care providers. In addition, consumers think that this is already happening.”

Dr. Supriya Sharma, Health Canada’s chief medical adviser, said natural health products are an important part of the health care system in Canada, and that more than 75 percent of Canadians use these products. Speaking to MPs in October 2024, she added that NHPs are lower-risk than prescription products, but that doesn’t mean they’re risk-free.

“There are the risks of the products themselves. There can be risks of problems with manufacturing. We talked about contamination,” Sharma said.