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/).