Health Canada Mandate: Protect Pharmaceuticals' Profits Instead Of Canadians' Health

Health Canada continues to extend a metaphorical middle finger to average Canadians. As has been clearly established by an ongoing Toronto Star investigation, the protectorate persists in placing the fiscal health of the pharmaceutical industry above that of Canadians.

Today's Star reports:

Canada’s biggest pharmacies are selling allergy pills made with ingredients from a drug facility in India that hid unfavourable test results showing excessive levels of impurities in their products, a Star investigation has found.

Recently, the Star purchased packs of over-the-counter desloratadine tablets from Toronto-based Shoppers Drug Mart, Rexall, Walmart and Costco stores.

One month before, on Dec. 23, Health Canada had announced these antihistamines — made by Pharmascience — were under quarantine after serious problems were unearthed during an inspection of the company’s drug facility in India. Inspectors found unsanitary conditions at the facility, including high growth of bacteria and mould.

Despite the fact that these data were uncovered by inspectors in 2012, the quarantine only applies to products made in the last month and a half.

“How can a medicine be too dangerous to import but safe enough to consume? This makes no sense,” said Amir Attaran, a law professor and health policy expert at the University of Ottawa.

By not ordering a recall, Attaran said, “Health Canada is knowingly leaving adulterated medicines on the pharmacy shelves.”

For their part, the pharmacies are hiding behind the fact that Health Canada has not ordered a recall of the products currently on the shelves, the same subterfuge that Pharmascience, the manufacturer of the drugs, is using.

This should be cold comfort indeed (no pun intended), given what FDA inspectors uncovered in the Indian plant where the ingredients come from. In addition to finding problematic test data being deleted from hard drives, they

also raised concerns about the water used to manufacture the drug ingredients. A probe of the microbiology lab found “significant growth of both bacteria and mold, and appeared to be TNTC (too numerous to count).” The company’s data used for detecting worrisome trends did not mention the problem, inspectors found.

Equally chilling,

the facility failed “to have adequate toilet and clean washing facilities supplied with hot water, soap or detergent,” inspectors found.

Asks the University of Ottawa’s Attaran,

“The cheapest greasy spoon in Toronto would be shut down if it had these conditions, but the pharmaceutical company sending stuff to Canada is allowed?” he said.

He questions why the government is allowing products originating from the facility to remain on pharmacy shelves, considering Canada’s Food and Drugs Act prohibits the sale of any drug manufactured under unsanitary conditions.

“The law is very clear on this,” he said. “We have evidence here that the product was manufactured under unsanitary conditions, and they’re selling it.

“What more does Health Canada want?”

These are questions all concerned Canadians should be demanding answers to. Given that an election is pending, perhaps our government will stop treating us, even temporarily, in such a contemptuous and cavalier manner?

Friend Or Foe?

You decide.

A message from Anonymous to ISIS:

We will hunt you, take down your sites, accounts, emails, and expose you…
From now on, no safe place for you online…
You will be treated like a virus, and we are the cure…
We own the internet…
We are Anonymous; we are Legion; we do not forgive, we do not forget, Expect us.

What, Me Worry?

H/t The Toronto Star

According to Star readers, there is plenty that could go wrong. Here is but a sampling of their concerns:

In his anti-terrorism speech, Stephen Harper said: “Over the last few years a great evil has been descending upon our world ... Canadians are targeted by these terrorists for no other reason than that we are Canadians. They want to harm us because they hate our society and the values it represents because they hate pluralism, they hate tolerance, and they hate freedom....the freedom we enjoy.”

Might I offer an interpretation of his remarks quoted above:

“Over the last few years a great evil has been descending upon Canada. So while purporting to protect Canadians, my government is targeting them simply because most of my fellow citizens are sheeple. More to the point, we can do what we like. We seek to strike fear into hearts in the hopes of winning the coming election. We hate opinions that stand in opposition to our own, we hate having to tolerate any opposition at all, and we are committed to diminishing further the remaining personal freedoms Canadians enjoy.”

Unfair? Too harsh? I invite anyone who believes so to examine the documented undermining of our democracy and its institutions wrought by Mr Harper over the past decade.

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. All you have to do is tell them that they are in danger of being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” (Hermann Goering)

Jan Michael Sherman, Halfmoon Bay, B.C.

Once the state usurps the authority to punish citizens prospectively for crimes that they allegedly “may” commit in future but have never actually committed or conspired to commit, this without due legal process: without formal charges being laid, without a hearing or a trial, much less before obtaining a conviction from a presumably still independent judiciary, we abandon all pretense of living as free citizens under a democratic system of government. It is the hallmark of every authoritarian regime at either end of the political spectrum to want to persecute, punish or “disappear” its political opponents extrajudicially: alleged “terrorists” today, “Banditen” as the Nazis called all those who opposed them or “Enemies of the State” under Stalin. Even a child knows how ridiculous and recklessly dangerous Harper’s proposed new powers, worthy of a Vladimir Putin, really are:

“Sentence first - verdict afterwards”, said the Queen to Alice. “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!” “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen. “I won’t!” said Alice. “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. “Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

If only. It seems that no one in Ottawa has learned anything from the Maher Arar debacle and is hell-bent on creating the perfect political climate for such travesties of natural justice to be repeated. Bill C-51 may protect the state from its citizenry (which our current government apparently lives in fear of) but fails to protect the presumptively innocent from malicious and unaccountable persecution by the state. It is a law antithetical to democracy and a betrayal of our most cherished human values.

Edward Ozog, Brantford

All of this puts me in mind of a 2002 movie called Minority Report. Anyone seen it?

David Bellamy Being Humiliated By George Monbiot Over Climate Change

The willfully ignorant will be offended, the critical thinker gratified, by this video:

This Is Great!

It is a strange online world we have created for ourselves, as this video amply demonstrates. Enjoy!

Canadaland Does It Again

Jesse Brown' Canadaland, the investigative website whose work allowed The Toronto Star to develop its series uncovering the Jian Ghomeshi scandal, is once again proving its worth in a landscape littered with corporate news media. This time it has discovered, thanks to a tip from a reader, the mysterious removal by Global News of an investigative report into that right-wing cabal known as the Koch brothers and their connections to Canada.

Last Thursday at 11:06am, an article titled "The Koch Stake in Canada" ran on GlobalNews.ca. The piece, by veteran investigative reporter Bruce Livesey summarized an upcoming investigative report titled "The Koch Connection," which, the article promised, was set to air two days later, on Saturday January 31 at 7pm. Global News promoted the item with a post on 16x9's Facebook page and a tweet from an official account, which was retweeted by Global's Washington correspondent Jackson Proskow.

By Thursday night, the article had disappeared from GlobalNews.ca, the Facebook post and official tweet were deleted, as was Proskow's retweet.

Fortunately, the original article, but not the promotion video, can be found on Google Cache, and it certainly makes for some interesting reading.

It explains how the Koch brothers have a vested interest in seeing the Keystone XL pipeline become a reality, given their extensive holdings in the Canada's tarsands. It also discusses well-known facts about the brothers, including the vast sums of money they direct to conservative politicians and climate-change denial groups.

As well, and this is perhaps where the investigation might have earned unwanted attention, they

fund the climate-change denying Fraser Institute think tank here in Canada.

The cached document also observes the following:

Multiple generations of Fraser Institute staffers and donors and board members have had links to the federal Conservative Party,” says Rick Smith, executive director of the Broadbent Institute, a liberal think tank. “And you know there’s no doubt that the Fraser Institute’saggressive denial of climate change, the Fraser Institute’s views on tax policy and on immigration – you can see resonating in Harper government policy.”

Yet the Kochs don’t seem to need to spend much money in Canada: after all, the policies of the Harper government on energy, pipelines, climate change and the oil sands dovetailwith their own. In fact, the Harper government has taken measures against the environmental movement that benefit the Kochs directly or indirectly.

So what is the official reason for pulling the exposé?

Canadaland conducted a telephone interview with Ron Waksman, Global News' Senior Director of Online News, Current Affairs, Editorial Standards & Practices, to try to get some answers. According to Waksman, it "was not up to scratch" and "had some holes in it."

Perhaps his most definitive reason was,

Look, when we have an editorial hypothesis, we need facts to back it up, we didn't have the facts to back it up. In my opinion it didn't meet our standards of fairness and balance. It just wasn't up to scratch.

Maddeningly short on specifics, Waksman's 'answers' invite the critical thinker to entertain darker possibilities.

With Canadaland at the helm on this story, I'm sure this isn't the last we will hear about it.

Oh, and one more ort to chew upon: Global News is owned by Calagry-based Shaw Communications, who advertise their services to the oil & gas industries here.

More On Our Opposition Leaders

Two posts I recently wrote were highly critical of both Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair for their apparent embrace, for political purposes, of Bill C-51, the bill that will serve only to further erode our civil liberties in the chimerical hope of containing terrorists threats to Canada. I expressed my disgust over the fact that both leaders seem ready to abandon the broader interests of Canada for the sake of their own quest for power, fearful of being labelled by the Harper machine as 'soft on terrorism.'

I may have been too quick to judge Mr. Mulcair.

According to Tim Harper in today's Star, Mulcair is preparing to diverge from Trudeau's acquiescence:

Voters will decide whether Opposition leader Tom Mulcair is brave or foolhardy, but the official Opposition is preparing a case to oppose the bill — not simply by working around the fringe on oversight or sunset clauses, but by questioning the guts of a bill that gives the country’s spy agency radical new powers, allows longer and easier preventive detention and would criminalize the “promotion” of terror from a naif in a basement.

The oppositions leaders' non-performance on this issue thus far has bothered me for a number of reason, their refusal to safeguard our liberties being only one of them.

Their timidity also bespeaks a jaundiced view of Canadian voters, one that says we are easily fooled and manipulated, a contemptuous philosophy found at the core of Harper strategies these past nine years. And while I have frequently expressed genuine concern on this blog about the general level of political engagement of my fellow citizens, political leaders who capitulate to the lowest common denominator essentially preclude the possibility of establishing vision and real leadership.

It would seem that Mulcair is mindful of this to some degree:

Mulcair will likely announce his opposition when the House returns later this month.

Is he filling an opening left by the Liberals? Yes. Is he ensuring he responds to his base? Surely.

There may be cold feet in the caucus, but opposition MPs must raise the questions, provide the skepticism and, ultimately, oppose a law if that is their view. They’re not supposed to flee from a wedge issue.

Mulcair will have to stand and explain that keeping Canadians safe does not mean sacrificing civil liberties. He will have to fend off the inevitable attacks that he is a weak-kneed terrorist-hugger.

But he will stand and oppose a bill he believes is flawed, meaning we will have one opposition leader doing his job.

To me, an opposition leader doing his job, despite the inherent political risks, commands respect; playing it safe, as is Justin Trudeau, does not.