Health bureaucracies are strange and dangerous creatures. They appropriate unto themselves the sole deciding power over what adults can and cannot put in to their bodies, in clear violation of our basic human rights.
Naturally, when they get things wrong the results can be disastrous for the health of a nation.
The bureaucrats at Health Canada have an impressive track record at botching things. Wherever they can it seems as though they try their hardest to ensure that Canadians are not only denied access to safe and effective treatments, but they encourage destructive behaviours, deliberately mislead the public, ignore science, and push dangerous drugs that are in many cases banned in the rest of the world.
It’s clear that Health Canada neither has the capacity, nor the intention to live up to its mandate and thusly should be abolished. A detailed account of their failures is too much for this author to compile but here are my top five reasons why Health Canada doesn’t deserve to exist.
They Force Children to Smoke
Under the original MMAR and now MMPR Health Canada only allowed for the consumption of dried cannabis buds. This meant that it had to be smoked if patients wanted to comply with the regulations.
But what if a patient had emphysema or some other respiratory illness that precluded their ability to smoke or inhale their medicine? What if they, like millions of other Canadians, simply did not want to inhale the carcinogenic compounds created whenever plant matter is combusted?
What if they were five years old?
In the case of Liam McKnight, a child who along with many others has to take cannabis in order to stop the never-ending seizures caused by his Dravet syndrome, a Health Canada bureaucrat literally told his mother that he had to smoke cannabis if she wanted to continue a legal treatment regime.
In order to put an end to this dangerous and irresponsible practice, patients had to sue Health Canada in what became known as the Smith trial. The trial centered on the production and possession of cannabis extracts such as edibles, oils and other concentrates.
The bureaucrats fought tooth and nail to keep children smoking and appealed the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. The judges, like the rest of the country, were absolutely appalled by Health Canada’s behaviour and decided in favour of patients.
They Distort Facts and Manipulate You
The disconnect between bureaucrats and the public is never more obvious than when they create a public relations campaign designed to influence you.
At the same time Health Canada was busy pushing the new MMPR system on the country, it spent $7 million on a reefer madness campaign discouraging people from trying cannabis. The messaging was so outside the realm of reasonable thought that three national doctor’s groups identified the campaign as clearly political and refused to endorse it.
Cited as evidence for the claims in the campaign were dubious and poor-quality studies that had already been debunked, disproven, or insufficient to support the conclusions put forth by Health Canada. It was rightfully dismissed by the public as baseless fear-mongering.
We unfortunately don’t fire politicians and bureaucrats for using our own money to lie to us. Perhaps it’s time we change that?
They Have No Concept of What Your Rights Are
Like true tyrants, the bureaucrats at Health Canada see Canadian citizens as ignorant children that need to be managed and sometimes forced in to doing what they believe is the ‘right’ thing. There’s no more obvious evidence of this when it comes to crafting constitutional medical cannabis regulations.
In the year 2000, Health Canada lost the Parker case and they were ordered by the court to produce a constitutionally-acceptable medical cannabis exemption.
Since then there has been no less than seven other lawsuits over 16 years against the bureaucracy, alleging that those regulations infringe on our constitutional rights. These cases have been won by cannabis patients every time, with the latest one being the Allard trial.
In his ruling, the Allard trial judge declared that Health Canada’s expert witnesses exhibited a significant degree of bias against cannabis, lacked objectivity, that they had no credibility and possessed none of the qualifications of a typical expert witness.
Are we really going to trust an agency that flirts with perjury when its opinions are challenged in court?
The Vienna Declaration has clearly identified that the drug war violates numerous established human rights and has plunged the globe in to an era of violence, sickness, and unimaginable human and economic losses.
There simply is no excuse for supporting prohibitionist policies anymore. Having 16 years to craft constitutional regulations and completely failing at that task disqualifies Health Canada from ever writing a piece of legislation again.
They’re Bigots
You would think that an agency full of scientists and doctors would be able to rise above petty human prejudices but sadly this couldn’t be further from the truth. Health Canada has a long and well-known history of institutionalized bigotry that has no place in our country.
To date, they still maintain the scientifically untenable position that gay men cannot donate blood. A panicked blanket-measure adopted during the AIDS scare of the 1980s that has no relevance today.
Sure, the bureaucrats made a ceremonial gesture to gay men recently about this that turned them in to a laughing stock. Abstain from sex for a whole year, and only then will they accept blood donations from homosexual men.
Now donating blood is a noble endeavour, but I don’t know anyone so committed that they’re willing to be celibate for an entire year just to do so.
We could at least credit Health Canada for trying, but the change was simply made to keep themselves in line with the latest policy coming out of the United States.
Going further, they also were found guilty of racial discrimination against an Indian scientist in their employ. They probably shouldn’t have done that as he later became a whistleblower who exposed a mountain of corruption in the bureaucracy. More on that in the next segment.
They’re Anti-Science
If you’re happy that bovine-growth hormone (rBGH) isn’t in use in Canada, you have Dr. Shiv Chopra to thank for it. As one of the apparently few, competent, and ethical employees at Health Canada he testified to a Senate Committee that Health Canada managers had pressured him to release suspect drugs into the food supply without the evidence of safety required by the Food and Drugs Act.
Chopra claims that he was told by a member of Health Canada’s Selection Board that his client is “the industry” and not the public. He accuses management of:
- Ignoring a central tenet of the Food and Drugs Act requiring manufacturers to provide evidence of safety before approval
- Ignoring and sidelining scientists who refuse to approve drugs without evidence of safety
- Approving veterinary drugs containing carcinogens and hormones that have detrimental health effects
- Refusing to revisit approved drugs after new evidence showed they were unsafe
- Ignoring or manipulating scientists’ reports on certain drugs
- Forbidding scientists to speak to anyone about their work.
After he, and two other whistleblowers, were terminated in 2004 he authored the best-selling book Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower. He continues to speak out to this day against Health Canada’s misconduct and reckless endangerment of Canadian lives.
Conclusion
When it comes to the Hippocratic Oath, the head quacks at Health Canada seem to have contracted a case of selected amnesia. For that, this humble author’s prescription is going cold-turkey on the unchecked political power. If you work there and still have something resembling a conscience, quit. Do it now.
This bureaucracy is clearly driven by political and (sometimes foreign) corporate interests, a phenomenon known as regulatory capture. This is a pervasive and incredibly destructive situation that winds up exempting politically-connected private entities from criminal law. The ultimate result is our rights being stripped away and used to line the pockets of private interests.
Are you going to stand for this?
Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments section!