Criminalization of Healthy Food

In 2008, Canadian conservatives introduced a wildly unpopular Bill C-51 - the Food and Drugs Act - legislation regulating foods, therapeutic products and cosmetics. Enraged vendors of herbs, supplements, and other natural remedies fought back hard. Conservatives didn't proceed with the Bill, but instead introduced C-36, the Consumer Product Safety Act, in 2010. C-36 is essentially a revised version of C-51 with the supplements marked as exempt. Two weeks after the United States passed its most restrictive legislation yet against health freedoms (the Food Safety Modernization Act, S.510), its Canadian counterpart, Bill C-36, was passed into law in December 2010 and will soon go into effect. Bill C-36 purports to protect the consumer, but what it actually does is abrogate the Rule of Law and grant police forces powers of invasion, arrest and confiscation on the mere suspicion that 'unsafe' consumer products are being sold, without the involvement of the courts. 'Violators' are to be assumed guilty until proven innocent. Additional provisions bypass Parliamentary procedure, thereby giving authority by decree to foreign organizations. Such unconstitutional legislation is no stranger in the Senate. Previous bills C-51, C-52, and C-6 (Anti-Terrorism Act) were all squashed, never reaching final reading status. Bill C-6 effectively died during the prorogation of Parliament early last year and was reincarnated as bill C-36 in the summer of 2010. The exemption of natural supplements appears to have satisfied the natural health industry as C-36 has slid through with little complaint. According to Shawn Buckley, president of the Natural Health Products Protection Association, C-36 could however be a Trojan horse of sorts. All that needs to happen now is a reintroduction of C-51 and we're right back where we started - health freedoms reduced to zero. From Canada's Preventdisease.com, the salient features of the Bill are as follows...read more>>>...