“Health Canada is trying to pass Bill C-51 which is designed to take away our freedoms to treat, purchase and use natural health care products, vitamins, supplements, herbs (whether in your backyard, or from a store), teas, natural body products, (they are extending their definitions to include pretty much everything, as well as extending their definition of ’selling’ to mean anything you give, provide, (meaning even to your children). This will effect our abililty to give and treat ourselves, our children, friends, family and clients (if you are a practitioner) with natural means. This bill is moving faster than any other bill to date, as most bills take months to pass, this one is moving in a matter of weeks – once it its the third signing, it will be passed.”
PLEASE TAKE ACTION and SPREAD THE WORD to protect your current right to use the foods, herbs, supplements, and therapies:
1. visit: http://www.stopc51.com and read Bill C-51 and/or the analysis
to form your own opinion about whether this law is good for you
or for your country
2. sign this petition and pass the word to your friends, family, anyone
who cares
3. write, phone, email your MP
4. http://www.stopc51.com/c51/what_you_can_do.asp
Thanks again for your considerate aid!
Sunny Lam
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnylam
******************************************
(NaturalNews) A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.
Among the changes proposed by the bill are radical alterations to key terminology, including replacing the word “drug” with “therapeutic product” throughout the Act, thereby giving the Canadian government broad-reaching powers to regulate the sale of all herbs, vitamins, supplements and other items. With this single language change, anything that is “therapeutic” automatically falls under the Food and Drug Act. This would include bottled water, blueberries, dandelion greens and essentially all plant-derived substances.
The Act also changes the definition of the word “sell” to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved “therapeutic substances.” Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at the Stop51.com website:http://www.stopc51.com
——–
New enforcement powers allow Canadian government to seize your home or business
At the same time that C-51 is outlawing herbs, supplements and vitamins, it would grant alarming new “enforcement” powers to the (thugs) enforcement agents who claim to be “protecting” the public from dangerous unapproved “therapeutic agents” like, say, dandelion greens. As explained on the www.Educate-Yourself.org website ((http://educate-yourself.org/cn/canadian…), the C-51 law would allow the Canadian government’s thugs enforcement agents to:
%u2022 Raid your home or business without a warrant
%u2022 Seize your bank accounts
%u2022 Levy fines up to $5 million and a jail terms up to 2 years for merely selling an herb
%u2022 Confiscate your property, then charge you storage fees for the expense involved in storing all the products they stole from you
C-51 would even criminalize the simple drying of herbs in your kitchen to be used in an herbal product, by the way. That would now be categorized as a “controlled activity,” and anyone caught engaging in such “controlled activities” would be arrested, fined and potentially jailed. Other “controlled activities” include labeling bottles, harvesting plants on a farm, collecting herbs from your back yard, or even testing herbal products on yourself! (Yes, virtually every activity involving herbs or supplements would be criminalized…)
There’s more, too. C-51 is the Canadian government’s “final solution” for the health products industry. It’s a desperate effort to destroy this industry that’s threatening the profits and viability of conventional medicine. Natural medicine works so well — and is becoming so widely used — that both the Canadian and American governments have decided to “nuke” the industries by passing new laws that effectively criminalize anyone selling such products. They simply cannot tolerate allowing consumers to have continued access to natural products. To do so will ultimately spell the destruction of Big Pharma and the outdated, corrupt and criminally-operated pharmaceutical industry that these criminally-operated governments are trying to protect.
Bill C-51 is an outrage, and absolutely makes no sense! They are taking away our natural rights, and makes me question if Canada is even a free country anymore. Things like vitamin C keep us healthy, and if we have to get such a simple supplement at a pharmacy, then they will be packed every day all day. Also, going to jail for a 2 year period for having a harmless supplement is horrible. We deserve to keep our natural rights, and we deserve to buy things that keep us healthy when we need it.
John,
It would seem the government and the business elite simply want to lock out the competition. The elites are the ones who are getting money from the pharmaceuticals for example.
The other day in the kitchen I was talking with my brother about stevia for example. Stevia could be grown in our back yard and is a calorie less sweetener. It could also be a major alternative to sugar. Yet Health Canada or the CFIA don’t want to approve it or allow it to be shipped in large amounts into Canada for safety reasons (on the face of it). You can only get it as a specialty item as far as I know.
“Indeed, millions of Japanese people have been using stevia for over thirty years with no reported or known harmful effects.[30] Similarly, stevia leaves have been used for centuries in South America spanning multiple generations in ethnomedical tradition as a treatment of type II diabetes.[31]” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia#Health_controversy)
I pointed out to my brother that the sugar industry would certainly not want to have competition from something like this because it upsets the way things are – which is making money for them using sugarcane, unfair labour practices and worse. Bill C-51 is essentially an under the table way of maintaining power.
The only place in Toronto that I know of that even serves stevia as a sugar alternative for their drinks and coffee is the recently opened Gilead Cafe (owned by Jamie Kennedy, a person who’d be most likely to support these alternatives; http://www.torontolife.com/features/gilead-cafe/).
Of course, John, you probably already knew all of that now that I think of it. (grins)