Canada’s new regulation is set to change the landscape of the natural health supplements industry. The rules liken vitamins and supplements to pharmaceutical drugs, affecting a wide array of products and businesses. Small to medium-sized businesses face financial challenges due to increased fees. The regulation also empowers Health Canada to impose hefty fines for non-compliance. The changes may lead to increased costs for companies and consumers, potential product unavailability, and a negative impact on small businesses. Canada’s new regulation is set to change the landscape of the natural health supplements industry. The rules liken vitamins and supplements to pharmaceutical drugs, affecting a wide array of products and businesses. Small to medium-sized businesses face financial challenges due to increased fees. The regulation also empowers Health Canada to impose hefty fines for non-compliance. The changes may lead to increased costs for companies and consumers, potential product unavailability, and a negative impact on small businesses.
Regulations with Natural Health Products
Transcript
Are you Canadian? Do you take natural health products? This affects you. There’s a new regulation in Canada that’s going to impact the cost of natural health supplements, your access to them, and severely impact small businesses.
Last year in June, a new budget bill was passed in Canada, and believe it or not, under these rules, vitamins and supplements will be placed in the same regulatory category as pharmaceutical drugs. Natural health products, which are often referred to as NHPs, could include anything from natural shampoos and toothpaste to vitamins, supplements, probiotics, and even traditional medicines.
So what this means is that your vitamin C, under this new ruling, would be regulated the same as an opioid. Just think about that for a second. These regulations may not seem like a big deal, but they really impact small to medium-sized natural health businesses that produce categorically low-risk products. They could end up having to pay thousands more per product just to keep them on the shelves from enforced labeling changes, cost recovery fees, and new product approval fees. These companies are looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in new fees. Just imagine you’re a small business—how would you deal with that?
On top of that, NHPs are already heavily regulated, so this is really an unnecessary step. But now, under Vanessa’s Law, this new regulation gives Health Canada increased powers, which could result in their ability to fine up to $5 million each day for non-compliance. With these new rules, fines can be given out for many reasons, like improper label formatting or what Health Canada refers to as misleading advertising and claims. These claims often have roots in cultural backgrounds. For instance, traditional Chinese medicine now falls under NHP regulation, so now traditional use evidence that goes back thousands of years no longer counts.
For a small business, getting hit with this fine is really a death sentence. These costs hurt the companies, and of course, they hurt consumers like us down the line, where products end up being a lot more expensive.
So why put forward this regulation? Health Canada says it’s for updated labeling and safety recall measures, but statistically, NHPs have minimal serious side effects. In fact, the American Poison Center’s annual report documented zero deaths as a result of NHPs in 2021. So this is all kind of useless. Meanwhile, medicinal errors and wrongly prescribed drugs impact thousands of Canadians per year. In 2022 alone, 7,300 Canadians died from opioid overdoses, which is an average of 20 deaths a day.
What’s ironic is that when businesses can’t afford the cost of overregulation, causing fewer available products on the shelves, consumers will naturally turn to online and international sources where regulation doesn’t exist. So overregulating to promote safety could instead promote the buying of unsafe products.
More than 75% of NHP companies are considering pulling products from their shelves, and one in five are considering leaving Canada entirely due to regulations and additional costs. This was according to a study conducted by the Canadian Health Food Association and Deloitte.
So what does this all really mean for you? It means increased prices on natural health products. It means potentially not being able to find the products you depend on, and small businesses being impacted. The reality is we live in a time now where our food systems are severely impacted through industrialized agriculture, where our food is having less and less nutrients, and a lot of people depend on natural supplementation in order to make sure their diet is full and healthy. Without this ability to take supplements, we are really impacting a lot of people’s health, and that’s why it’s important that people start talking about this issue.
The new regulatory changes come into effect by 2025, but there has been big pushback. Right now, there are about 23 petitions presented by the House of Commons on this issue, and the most popular one has been signed by almost 15,000 people. There’s a lot of Canadians that care about this issue and want their access to natural health supplements to stay the same. MPs have been flooded with letters and postcards from concerned citizens across Canada. So this is a big issue, and we need to continue to bring this topic to light.