Conservative MP Blaine Calkins said he has made an application to the House speaker to have all clauses of his private member’s bill on natural health products reinstated, after Liberal MPs voted in committee to delete every clause.
Bill C-224 aimed to amend the Food and Drugs Act to determine that natural health products are not therapeutic products within the meaning of that act, and are therefore not subject to the same monitoring regime as drugs. The bill would have rolled back increased regulations on these products that the Liberal government put in place in 2023.
“Unfortunately, the minister of health has made the decision to gut Bill C-224. The Liberal members of the committee deleted every clause of Bill C-224, including the title, and [the committee] is basically reporting my bill back to the House of Commons as a blank sheet of paper,” Calkins said during a press conference on Nov. 4.
Calkins said House Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia will now decide whether to reinstate the bill’s clauses, “and when we get to report stage, discussion or debate of my bill, we’ll see what clauses remain in the bill.”
Calkins said that Canada had a “very robust” regulatory approval system prior to the new regulations on health products introduced by the Liberal government, adding that there were “very few incidences of people being harmed by natural health products, and most of those simply centre around the wrong dosage of taking these particular things or not reading the label.”
The Tory MP said the new regulations mean that a “small vitamin shop” now needs to go through the same process that a pharmaceutical company would have to go through to approve a product. He said this will increase the cost of vitamins and minerals, while also creating an “opportunity for an exodus of Canadian businesses.”
President of the Natural Health Products Protection Association Shawn Buckley told reporters that due to increasing regulatory burdens, some natural health products in Canada can cost four or five times their price in the United States.
Bill C-224 had previously received unanimous support at second reading in the House of Commons in March, but the six Liberal members of the 11-member House health committee voted against each of the four clauses of on Oct. 7.
Liberal MP Jake Sawatzky raised concerns that the rollbacks to the regulations proposed by Calkins’s bill would give the government fewer tools to ensure products are safe.
“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.
Kim Godard, director general of Health Canada’s Natural and Non-prescription Health Products Directorate, has said that the 2023 legislation strengthened the department’s authority to address safety concerns involving natural health products already on the market.
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 by the Liberal committee members.
A previous version of the bill introduced by Calkins, Bill C-368, was introduced during the last Parliament. It did not proceed when Parliament was dissolved in 2025 ahead of the federal election.
