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Government Hijacked by Industry
Vitality September 2005 (Revised June 2008)
By Helke Ferrie
“The Panel identified… serious concerns about the undermining of the scientific basis for risk regulation in Canada due to… the conflict of interest created by giving to regulatory agencies the mandates both to promote the development of agricultural technologies and to regulate it…
Royal Society of Canada
Expert Panel Report on the Future
of Food Biotechnology, 2001
In 2005 this whole exercise was attempted by the Martin government. Industry and government have been trying for quite some time to circumvent or neutralize the nation state grounded in law. The approach taken in 2005 was first to eliminate the known opposition by finding some pretext to fire those civil servants who are likely to object to “modernizing” the law, then tiptoe around parliament calling it a “minor” modernization, hope that no MP wakes up, and warn your corporate friends so they can put their army of lobbyists on high alert.
That was The Plan in 2003, but in early 2005 some MPs woke up with a start, the Senate went into high gear and asked questions, the media didn’t play corporate ball, and a conference was held in Ottawa hosted by the Canadian Health Coalition for the purpose of exposing The Plan’s horrendous consequences. At this conference the Public Guardian Awards were presented to those very civil servants who had been fired to prevent them from protecting us, namely Drs. Shiv Chopra, Margaret Haydon, and Gerard Lambert: they had defied a series of administrations and stopped bovine growth hormone in Canada and Europe, exposed the dangers of genetically engineered crops, and refused to approve harmful antibiotics like the now banned Batryl. They were fired for “insubordination” as soon as Paul Martin became Prime Minister. The Senate, however, had all three testify in April and comment specifically on two bills. These scientists told the Senate of their many decades of fighting for safe food and drugs against an ever-growing tide of “corporatization of knowledge and the instituting of private interests ahead of the public good”, as Dr. Chopra said; they also described the pressures brought to bear upon them by the Privy Council itself to conform to corporate interests, in flagrant violation of Canadian law. That whole story is now told in Dr. Chopra’s 2008 book, Corrupt to the Core. See details at the end of this book.
The Plan was to get bills C-27 and C-28 passed. The first was to dissolve all independent oversight on the food industry, allowing the industry to regulate itself as well as eliminate accountability, if harm was done. Bill C-28 was to do the same for all drugs. The Globe and Mail pointed out on November 10, 2003, when these bills were introduced, that they would have the effect of “preventing Canadians from suing Health Canada for negligence, even for flagrant failures like those that occurred during the tainted-blood scandal [and] greatly increase the likelihood that unsafe drugs and hazardous products make their way to market”; it quoted Mike McBane of the Canadian Health Coalition: ”The evidence indicates that federal health and safety regulatory agencies have been captured by industry.”
Following second reading, during parliamentary committee hearings in April, Cathy Holtslander of the Beyond Factory Farming Coalition, observed that C-27 would force Canada to adopt regulatory practices of other countries without any debate here (why not pension off all our MPs right now?). Furthermore, this bill authorized the privatization of all food inspection services – just what the GMO business needed. Both bills shifted all regulation from the internationally supported “precautionary principle” to the corporate “risk management” approach which looks at the profits first: if profits are still reaped from a product that harms a certain percentage of people, the food or drug stays on the market. Bill C-28 specifically exempted agricultural chemicals, drugs in any combination, pest control products, and food additives which could not be identified as “adulteration”. They were also to be allowed at residues higher than currently considered safe internationally. This “harmonized” Canada with the US, of course. The European Union took note and their reaction is described in my article at the start of Chapter 5.
Ottawa’s The Hill Times wrote about these two bills on April 25, 2005: “Hocus-pocus, adulteration is not adulteration if the Minister of Health says so! The effect of bill C-28 is to eviscerate the Minister of Health’s statutory duty to protect the public from health hazards and fraud… [even for those] drugs which are believed to be carcinogens like estradiol … [also] used in beef production.”
Holtslander’s submission, and those of others, such as the Council of Canadians, cut through the verbal manure by pointing out that the government’s “Smart Regulations”, which interpret these two bills, are designed to totally integrate Canada’s regulatory practices with those of the US. Now Magazine, in a masterful article by Adria Vasil (April 21, 2005) dubbed these regulations as being “Canada’s version of No Lobbyist Left Behind.” Indeed, Vasil reported, that Big Pharma and pesticide companies were so happy, they fired off celebratory press releases about this initiative “within moments” of Ottawa’s announcement.
What made those corporations so happy is likely one specific sentence in the report by the committee that concocted what they called “Smart Regulations” supporting these two bills:. It states that “ …the government should adopt international approaches wherever possible and limit specific Canadian regulatory requirements.” Of course “international” actually means the Us and
Canada
– the EU has very different ideas about these issues.
Holtslander observed: “We would completely abandon our power to set and enforce independent rules,” because these new regulations make it plain that bills C-27 and 28 “put trade ahead of public safety, and integration with the US ahead of democratic Canadian control of what we eat.” Here was Paul Martin’s blank cheque to industry and his love letter to President Bush. So, let’s tear up the Charter and disband the Supreme Court, since these proposed laws, together with existing and proposed trade treaties, have the effect of superceding national law and the basic rights of Canadian citizens.
For some reason our current Prime Minister chooses to forget that his predecessor’s attitude on these matters was one of the main reason why Canadians no longer trusted the Liberals. At the time, Harper understood, otherwise he wouldn’t have written that letter to all those outraged Canadians who wanted Lunney’s bill C-420 passed.
What does this mean in the real world?
University
of
Hawaii
research shows that chemical preservatives in processed meats increase the risk of pancreatic cancer 67-fold, or 6,700 % (www.prnewswire.com, April 26, 2005). Such findings could not be used for a legal action against the meat-processing industry in Canada, if bills C-27 and 28 become law, because we would be perfectly aligned with the US. This is how:
These bills are timed so as to ensure Canada will be ready to hand over the nation when CAFTA, the next trade treaty, comes into force. We sold the farm, the city and the hamlet with NAFTA, but there was still something left to sell: our right to know what is in our foods and drugs and to demand responsibility for damage. There is perfect logic to all this: why maintain two corrupt regulatory bodies (Health Canada and the FDA) when one will do just as well to manage the free-trade flow of goods of mysterious and unknowable quality? In a true show of solidarity President Bush, perhaps after watching the documentary “Supersize Me” and realizing that a lot of loopholes were still open for true accountability to creep in and that they needed to be plugged, he introduced in May 2005 the “Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act” already dubbed “The Cheeseburger Bill”. This bill would ensure nobody is able to sue food producers, sellers or distributors, even if harmful or addictive chemicals are intentionally added to foods.
In another supportive gesture, the US government gave Health Canada the FDA Award in May. Then Canadian Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh explained that it celebrates the “dedication of Government of Canada staff in achieving our cultural goal of improving the health of citizens on our shared continent.” Well, tell that to the 23,000 or so Canadians and some 700,000 Americans who die every year of properly prescribed drugs, as the Canadian and American Medical Associations tell us. Those drugs kill because Health Canada and the FDA ask few questions, have the questions they do ask muzzled, treat Big Pharma’s dubious science as trade secrets, and yield to political pressure to pass drugs they know are unsafe.
It would spoil the party to mention mad cows caused by feeding slaughterhouse waste to them. One French researcher observes in the 1999 NFB documentary, “The Genetic Takeover or Mutant Fods” that “everyone worships the golden calf and then they turn into mad cows.”
And then there are those GMOs which now, in 2008, are known to cause a host of health problems, as documented by Jeffrey Smith in his compilation of the science involved, Genetic Roulette (see the suggested reading list at the end of this book.) We also must not forget the cancer and asthma burden inflicted especially upon our children solely due to pesticides, as the Ontario College of Family Physicians report revealed in May 2004. However, in May of 2005, Health Canada, true to form, interpreted its mandate of “improving the health of citizens” as including the approval of the carcinogenic and neurotoxic herbicide 2,4 D at levels which exceed the World Health Organization’s guidelines for children under five. If bills C-27 and 28 had passed, even complaining about the corporate abuse of human health would be futile. For Health Canada these bills would, of course, provide great relief since they are facing negligence lawsuits in the range of $ 13 billion.
The encouraging fact is that the persistence of the nutritional medicine doctors is beginning to pay off: the mainstream is finally getting it. Three examples: On May 5th Oxford University in the UK announced: “Foods affect behavior. To ignore the role of nutrition is indefensible,” Dr. Patrick Holford of the UK-based Brain Bio Centre said. “We’re seeing outrageous imbalances in brain chemistry caused by the kinds of foods that sadly millions of kids are eating, and no one’s doing anything about it.” (www.brainbiocentre.com) (Canada and the US are doing something about – they are trying to pass legislation that ensures kids continue eating this junk and that their parents can’t complain about it either.)
The American Journal of Psychiatry reported in April 2005 that the chemical additives in junk food cause such serious deficiencies in zinc, iron and the B vitamins upon all of which the brain depends, that the dramatic increase in violence can be directly explained by the resulting altered brain chemistry. The study noted also that 80% of North Americans are chronically deficient in these brain foods (www.organicconsumers.org/school/agression040405.cfm). Is that why they go to war all the time? On April 22 Guelph University reported in the Journal of Nutrition the importance of essential fatty acids to the development of the human fetus and especially the brain, but that most pregnant Canadian women do not obtain the required amounts in their normal diet.
The truth is out there but requires eternal vigilance. Hopefully, not “eternal” if at all possible! Maybe if the current bills C-51 and 52 can be killed, this and future governments will get the message that we are not as stupid as advertising tends to assume people are.
This is a short, updated version of an article published in Vitality Magazine, September 2005.
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