After a cabinet shuffle in Ottawa last week, former Conservative MP Terence Young is calling for the new health minister to personally review a drug safety law that he is criticizing Health Canada for watering down.
Young helped spearhead what has been dubbed Vanessa’s Law, a robust drug safety law passed without dissent in Parliament and the Senate in November 2014.
The bill helps protect Canadians by making it mandatory for health-care institutions to report all adverse drug reactions in patients to health regulators, among other things. These dangerous drugs could then be taken off the market.
But Young, who lost his seat in the 2015 election, says Health Canada is diluting the powers of the bill by not requiring all health-care facilities to report incidents of adverse drug reactions. He is calling for new Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor to take a close look at the issue because Canadian lives are at stake, he says.
“The new minister is going to have to direct Health Canada and going to have to intervene, and it has to happen soon because the regulations that Health Canada is proposing would gut the bill and send us back 10 years in drug safety,” Young says.
The issue is personal for Young. He lost his 15-year-old daughter Vanessa, who inspired the name of the bill, when she died of a heart attack in 2000 after taking a prescription drug to treat a mild form of an eating disorder.
