Tory Bill to Ease Restrictions on Natural Health Products Voted Down by Liberals

Liberal MPs on the House health committee voted against a Conservative bill seeking to ease regulations on natural health products in Canada.

Conservatives say the regulations are onerous without adding additional safety benefits, while the Liberals say the legislation would weaken Health Canada’s safeguards.

All six Liberal members of the 11-member committee on Oct. 7 voted against each of the four clauses of Bill C-224 under debate.

The bill, sponsored by Conservative MP Blaine Calkins, had previously gotten unanimous support at a second reading in the House of Commons. It sought to roll back increased regulations on natural health products put through by the previous Liberal government in 2023 via Bill C-47.

The bill had enjoyed Liberal support at second reading in the House, leading Conservative MP Matt Strauss to question why Liberal committee members were now opposing it.

“You voted for it in principle. You thought it was a good thing, so you all voted for it, and then you’ve done this switcheroo,” he said.

Liberal MP Jake Sawatzky said the rollbacks proposed by Calkins’s bill would give the government “fewer tools” to ensure product safety.

“If we accept that natural health products can cause adverse reactions, can have clinically significant interactions with prescription medications, and like other products, can sometimes be contaminated, then why would we want fewer tools available to protect Canadians when risks [are] identified after those products are already on the market?” Sawatzky said.

Calkins responded that the regulations on natural health products just make them cost more and don’t increase consumer safety.

“Other than recall, tell me what new powers that you’re actually granting Health Canada?” he asked Sawatzky.

“You’re not. What you’re doing is you’re granting Health Canada the ability to make more onerous regulations and costly bureaucratic steps involved in the process. You’re not actually adding anything that they didn’t already have for powers in the first place.”

In an Oct. 8 statement, Calkins criticized the Liberals for rejecting the bill. w

“Conservatives came to committee ready to work. We listened to the concerns raised, were prepared to work with all parties on amendments and tried to find a path forward that would keep Canadians safe while reducing costly and unnecessary red tape,” he said.

Calkins noted that his previous Bill C-368, which was similar in its provisions to Bill C-224, passed the House health committee in December 2024 but didn’t become law prior to the previous Parliament being dissolved.

He said the regulations that were in place before Bill C-47 “already kept Canadians safe” and the bill had just added unnecessary red tape.

Authority of Health Canada

A central topic of debate during the Oct. 7 committee meeting was over the appropriate scope of power for Health Canada.

Liberal MP Maggie Chi asked Health Canada officials testifying before the committee about the risks that could arise from removing the regulatory requirements introduced in 2023, in light of a 2021 audit by the Office of the Auditor General that concluded there were weaknesses in how the agency conducted oversight of natural health products.

Director General of Health Canada’s Natural and Non-prescription Health Products Directorate Kim Godard said the 2023 legislation boosted the department’s power to respond to safety concerns once natural health products were on the market.

“One of the reasons that there was amendments in 2023 was to give those tools so that in the post-market space, so when the products are on the market, we could take action when needed,” she said, adding that labelling was also identified as a potential problem area by the 2021 audit and is being improved under the changes put in by Bill C-47.

“We’ve introduced label change, and we’re trying to work with industry to get to a space where we we hit the happy medium.”

Vanessa’s law, enacted in 2014, put in place stricter recall laws on health products, and the related regulations were expanded to cover natural health products under Bill C-47. Health Canada said it hasn’t yet issued a recall on natural health products.

“The ability to order a recall—that is a power under Vanessa’s law. My understanding is that there is a threshold to be met to order a recall, that would have to be met, and it’s only in the most serious of cases,” director general of the Health Product Compliance Directorate at Health Canada Sara O’Connor told the committee.

Godard also responded to concerns brought up by Conservatives on the committee about recall authority.

“Operationalizing recalls, it is not the minister that looks at the evidence,” she said. “We have inspectors on the ground, highly educated experts in the area that look at the data and then recommend a recall. The power is delegated to apolitical public servants.”

‘We’re Not Opposed to Recall’

Conservative MP Raquel Dancho said Health Canada could still keep the power to issue a mandatory recall without having to put natural health products under the same statutory category as therapeutic medication.

“We’ve also made it clear that we’re not opposed to recall,” she said.

However, Dancho emphasized her view that “natural health products are not food, and they’re not pharmaceutical drugs,” and thus should occupy a unique category.

President of the Natural Health Products Protection Association Shawn Buckley previously testified on Sept. 26, 2024, that the changes put in by Bill C-47 leave little legal power to challenge Health Canada. He added that the changes treat natural health products too much like pharmaceuticals.

In more recent evidence submitted to the health committee on Oct. 5, Buckley’s organization said the amount of regulation of natural health products was not proportionate to their risk, saying they should not be in the same category as therapeutic products.

“Mr. Buckley was here and he said that your chances of having one of these interactions, a negative interaction, is lower than getting struck by lightning,” Calkins said of Buckley’s testimony at the Oct. 5 meeting.

Bloc Québécois MP Marie-Hélène Gaudreau put forward amendments aimed at keeping Health Canada’s authority to issue recall orders and mandate labelling changes while allowing other provisions of Calkins’s bill to proceed.

Both amendments were defeated, with all six Liberal committee members voting against them.

At this point, the bill will go back to the House stripped of its four primary rollback provisions. Calkins said that Conservatives will keep pushing for the reform they’re seeking.