Autogenerated Transcript Tens of millions of Canadians rely on natural health products to treat illnesses and conditions, and to simply provide better health. But Trudeau's government is hell -bent on removing natural health products from our store shelves. Last year it was Bill C-67 where the government amended the natural health products regulations to destroy the natural health products industry. This year, it was Bill C-69, which hid clauses in the budget bill to further protect the interests of Big Pharma. These most recent changes are harder the first time our federal government has attempted to deny Canadians access to natural products they choose for themselves, rather than having artificial compounds prescribed by a doctor. Shawn Buckley, a lawyer and the founder of the NHPPA, the Natural Health Product Protection Association, has been fighting our government on this for decades. But this time, the government may very well succeed in killing the natural health products industry. Shawn tells us that if we do not take action by spring of next year, we may see these begin to disappear from store shelves. However, Shawn has a plan to reverse this legislation. The Charter of Health Freedom outlines three action steps that would remove health products from under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health permanently, and establish a Ministry of Wellness to oversee these products and guarantee that they will remain available to Canadians in the future. And he's already collected 135 ,000 signatures. And those aren't e-signatures. Those are on paper, which already makes Shawn's petition the third largest in Canadian history. Shawn's goal is a quarter million. With those quarter million signatures, our elected officials must take notice of voters' concerns and reverse Bill C-67, protecting and preserving our right to choose natural health products that work for us. Shawn, it's a pleasure to have you back on the show. Well, it's a pleasure to be on your show. As you know, I'm quite fond of what you do, and I really respect the fact that you're trying to get the truth out there. Well, and the feeling is mutual. The work that you have done with NHP, PPA is just amazing. I'm trying to protect our access to natural health products, and especially these days with everything the government's doing, Bill C69 and all of those changes. But you've come up with what I think is absolutely brilliant idea, and it's not just a brilliant idea. It's working and it's working in spades. Change, or sorry, the Charter of Health Freedom at CharterofHealthFreedom .org. And you're collecting signatures to get the government to back off on this stuff that they've done. And it's amazing what you've done. You're looking at a quarter million actual signatures on paper. And I believe as of, I just checked it this morning, you've got 135 ,000 of them That's that's incredible. Yeah, so Will, just so your audience understands, I mean, this is a paper petition. I mean, we've at the NHPPA, we've set up, you know, electronic petitions and it's easy to get 100 ,000 signatures. But on a paper petition where we're at already, we're the third largest paper petition in Canadian history where we're at. And our goal is, is basically to double where we're at and get a quarter of a million signatures and it's hard to get paper signatures. So people are responding dramatically and the MPs know this. So our goal is to have an MP introduce the petition for the Charter of Health Freedom with a quarter of a million signatures and that will not have happened in decades and it'll send a strong message that people want to have sovereignty over their own bodies. So people have to go to charter of healthfreedom .org and read the charter. You'll be astounded. Basically, what we're trying to do is entrench the rights over your own body that the courts have already said that you have. They've forgotten a little bit with COVID and also entrenched some presumptions that are necessary to keep bodies like Health Canada from interfering with actually having sovereignty over your own body. And it takes the ball away from Health Canada. See, Health Canada is in what we call a drug model, a chemical drug model, which is totally inappropriate for natural health products and other low risk treatments that we rely on. So it creates a ministry of wellness that isn't there to police these, you know, natural health products and other treatment modalities. The ministry is charged by law with protecting and promoting our access. Isn't that a different idea? Because right now we're in an end game where Health Canada's trying to take our access away and we're actually tired of just sitting and doing nothing. So we've got a proactive piece of legislation that we're gonna force the government to introduce and pass. Right. Very exciting. Yeah, you and I have done a couple of interviews before on NHPPA, on Bill C69, the changes to the Health Act and what it means for our access to natural health products, but let's assume that some people who are watching this interview haven't seen that, may not be aware of what's going on. Could you please give our viewers just a few minute summary of where we're at right now and how the access to natural health products is at such grave risk right now. Oh, absolutely. So Health Canada is in the process of basically bringing into force what they call the self -care framework. And it's going to bring us into 100 % compliance with the chemical drug regulations. It's going to spell the end of the natural health product industry and some of our healing traditions. So if you rely on naturopathic doctors, homeopathic doctors, traditional Chinese practitioners, for example, those traditions are going to go away because under this new framework, if it's a product or if it's for a condition for which you'd actually seek the help of one of these practitioners, they're not going to license it anymore. And they're basically only going to allow these treatments for the most minor of conditions for conditions that you wouldn't seek the health of a health care practitioner and otherwise we have to go through the regular chemical drug approval process and we can't do it we can't comply and everyone agrees we can't comply including Health Canada it's meant to move us into a model where we don't have a vibrant choice anymore so we truly at the end game. So not only go to Charter of Health Freedom, but go to nhppa .org and learn about the self -care framework, learn about what Health Canada is doing. The Charter of Health Freedom is our prime way of stopping this and protecting our access. Over 70 % of Canadians take natural health products regularly because they rely on them. I've had court cases where the court has agreed with me that lives were a risk. In fact, you know, one case where the court found that more lives would have been lost because we're actually lost of life because Health Canada restricted access to a single product. This is life and death. This is absolute life and death and we need everyone to get involved. Dr. Darrell Bock And of course, some people have different views on this, but my own view of what they're doing with it was bringing all of these natural health products under the purview of Health Canada, under the same regulations that they use for pharmaceuticals is intentionally trying to kill that industry. Because as you said, they can't do it. They can't afford it. It costs so much money to get these pharmaceutical approvals that there's no way these natural health product providers can come up with that kind of cash. And so they're trying to kill it so that everybody is going to now be under, basically only have choice of you go a big pharma or nothing. And that's my own take on it. You may have to be a little bit different, but the point is they are killing the natural health products industry and very intentionally so. It is the intention. It's the absolute intention. And they've put us into a couple of models and paradigms that are absolutely false. And perhaps just to support what you're seeing, I'm just going to share with your audience about the drug model, which itself is an absolute fraud on us. And the way the drug model works, and just so you know, the drug model came in in the 1930s in both Canada and all other Western nations, so it was a coordinated effort to fleece us. And the drug model works like this. There's three parts, and the first part is you define drugs so broadly that it includes anything used for a health purpose. So anything used to prevent illness, anything used to treat illness. Well, if you were here with me and I said, "Boy, you look dehydrated, here's some water." I would be breaking the law. I'd be breaking a whole bunch of laws because I now would have made water a drug. I would have suggested that you use it for a health purpose to treat dehydration. I will not have had a license, I will not have proved to Health Canada that water treats dehydration, I wouldn't have a site license. I could be in a world of hurt because I would have suggested you use water to treat dehydration. The point I'm making is that everything is a drug regardless of how low risk or how silly this is. The second part of the drug model, And listen carefully, is that it's illegal to manufacture, sell, or use any drug that isn't approved of by Health Canada. So literally, I can't sell or use, I can't give away water to treat dehydration, it's illegal. I like to use ginger tea as an example. We've probably been using ginger tea for 3 ,000 years to treat nausea and other digestive issues, well all of a sudden it's illegal in Canada to use something we've been using for 3 ,000 years for a therapeutic purpose, and it's illegal to share the information about it, you know, which you would need to do to get people to take ginger tea to treat nausea. So everything is illegal unless the it's approved it, which is a legal philosophical place you never want to be in as a society. And then the third part of the drug model is that you make the approval process for serious health conditions so expensive that only novel chemical drugs can afford to get through the process. And when I say serious health condition, understand that I really mean things where there's big money attached. So the big five would be mental illness, huge money in psychiatric drugs, erectile dysfunction, that's clearly a serious health condition, huge money there, arthritis, and we're talking even minor arthritis, huge money there, heart disease is an obvious one and cancer, those would, you know, maybe be number four and five on our leading causes of death, the top three being all connected to chemical pharmaceutical drugs. So if you want to treat a serious health condition, let's just leave it at those five in Canada. You have to go through what's called the new drug approval process. The last time I had an expert on the stand and so under oath asked an expert, "Well, what's the average cost to go through this process. Without blanking, I was told a billion dollars. Right. Now, you can get through it for maybe several hundred million on a simple application, but do you know on a complicated application, the application fee to Health Canada itself is a quarter of a million dollars. Yes. Now, so what's happened will is since the 1930s, the only drugs that get through, well, It took a little later to get us that complicated. But for your lifetime and my lifetime, the only drugs that have managed to have the money to go through this process are drugs where you have a patent. And what a patent is, is if you invent something new, you can apply for a patent and you'll have like 20 or 30 years where no one else can make your new invention because you have a patent. You can go to court and say, "No, you can't. I've got the exclusive right and so unless they pay you a license fee you agree to, you can charge whatever you want. You basically have a monopoly." My favorite example in the drug world is Viagra. When Viagra first got approved, well, Pfizer gets Viagra approved, they were just charging an arm and a leg. I think they were actually deliberately restricting the number of pills they made so they could charge a fortune and some people would be buying them and reselling them at even more, it was so popular. Well now the patents expired and anyone can make Viagra, in fact the generic drug name is Cedenofil and so the prices dropped like a stone, but Pfizer recouped the money to go through this process and then made a whole bunch of money but you can't patent a natural product. So in your lifetime and my lifetime, the only drugs that have been approved for serious health conditions are novel chemicals that didn't exist when we made the decision to go into the drug model. So if any of your viewers have a heart attack or they're diagnosed today with serious cancer or they get serious arthritis and they go to the hospital or they access the medical doctors, the only treatments that are legal and consequently the only treatments they're going to be offered are chemicals that are novel chemicals that didn't exist before. And this is all by design. And so if I was to let's say we had your audience, let's say we didn't have a drug policy and your audience was tasked with, Will you come up with a drug policy to get good health outcomes? Never in a million years would your audience come back to us and say, "We think the best way to treat serious health conditions is to treat them with novel chemicals that don't exist yet." But they'll be invented because we're going to design this drug policy so that only drugs with patents, so they've got to be invented and get a patent, only they can get through this process and get approval. That's how we're going to have the best health outcomes. And I hope everyone watching is going, "That's madness." Yes. But that's our drug law. Right now, it's only legal to treat ourselves with serious health conditions, with novel chemicals that didn't exist when we it to enter this madness and Health Canada as a police force extinguishes ruthlessly any natural product that tries, tries to treat your self -conditions. I think it's very important for the viewers who may just be new to this, who don't understand that this has been going on right under our noses, that we're not talking about bills that are currently in front of the house. This is stuff that's been passed. It's in law now, but there's also something of a delay on as we discussed the last time we had an interview on when we're going to start seeing natural health products disappearing off the store shelves. So just fill us in on what's been passed and, of course, we discussed some of the details of it, but just one of the bills has been passed. What changes did they make and where are we at on that timeline of losing access to natural health products? Yeah. So, So, Will, I wanted to explain the drug model, and I made it clear we're talking about serious health conditions. So what Health Canada is doing is basically now applying that drug model with the vengeance to moderate health conditions, so that we will find ourselves very quickly, and I say very quickly in the next two years, where really our only options to treat even moderate health conditions will be limited to chemical drugs, which again add up their novel. They had a patent. They didn't exist before. They're not natural things. So that's going to happen in the next couple of years. So we already have cost recovery has been gazetted and Health Canada is clear they did not do an economic analysis. They're doing this to suck money out of the industry, and everyone's aware that most of our manufacturers are either going to go out of business or drop product lines dramatically, and the products that survive are going to cost a lot more. We're already over -regulating to the point that the same products in Canada cost three or four times what they cost in the United States, where there isn't this heavy regulatory burden for the exact same products. So now lower income Canadians already are discriminated against and and they can only access the chemical drugs that the government pays for. But as far as the exact regulations, for example, that are not going to allow products that our health care practitioners use, the products that are going to bring in a harmonization, Health Canada refuses to show us the draft of those. It probably had a draft since about 2017 when they told us this is exactly what we're doing and you can't negotiate with us, we're just pressing ahead regardless of what you say, but I expect we're going to see those introduced this year and I expect that we're going to start losing products probably within a year, maybe less, definitely within two years and And that's when people will rebel, unless we can get them to rebel now. We're really encouraged by the pressure that we've been able to put on. Last year, Health Canada snuck into the federal budget changes to the Food and Drug Act that basically brought in tyranny as far as penalties go. And through public pressure, there's now a public members bill. And the NHBPA, we've gotten almost half a million letters sent on that issue alone because people have been so engaged in our campaigns. So I'm hopeful, but people have to learn what's going on and definitely get engaged in this charter petition because it's our best hope. Let's get this out of Health Canada's hands. Let's get this into a new ministry and let's get legal rights and presumptions necessary to protect our access in place. That's a perfect segue into my next question because the Charter of Health Freedom, you've got three basic tenets to this charter that you're proposing that would give us back our control over and write to natural health products and do it in a way that is safe, that does take into account that there may be some products that have to be regulated perhaps. Please tell us what those three basic tenets are. Yeah. So basically, what the Charter does is it entretches the health rights of the courts had previously said that we had. And then also some common sense presumptions, like a patient is the best source about whether or not a product works for them, regardless of what that product is, be it chemical or natural. I mean, we know our own bodies, we know what's going on. Let's not disregard that, and let's not over -regulate products out of existence. I mean, economists call that rent -seeking. If you're a multi -billion -dollar company and you're shipped to 6 ,000 stores, well, your recall policy is probably about 50 pages thick if you have a problem with a product. And it needs to be. But you know, if you're a single herb shop that wildcrafts herbs and only sell out of your shop, your recall policy is is you take them off the shelf and put them in the back room. We don't need to over -regulate you out of existence and we don't need to remove products That are safe and people rely on without there being evidence like in the United States the FDA can't remove a natural product from the market Unless they have compelling evidence it actually poses a risk and Congress wrote that into the law because it's so clear These these products are the entire industry is safer than lightning will Yes, we have we have about 10 Canadians a year gets struck by lightning 1 in 4 million It's like killed by lightning each year, not just struck. And you know, I'm hard -pressed to point out a single credible report of a death caused by a natural product, like, so what are we even talking about? So and then moving them into a ministry of wellness to protect and promote our access. Yeah, so it's just, those are the main parts, but The Ministry of Wellness has significant powers to prevent against fraud, adulteration, unsafe manufacture, things like that, because you always have, you know, the industry is really good, but you always have, with every group of people, you have to protect against people that will just get in there and are trying to be helpful and are being fraudulent and the like. So, there's no worries from that end. There's a lot of teeth there, but it also creates a health freedom ombudsman. We've learned the best example is the True Hope file where the court found that Health Canada caused deaths and there would have been more deaths if True Hope had not continued selling. We had people whose lives depended on this product. Health Canada was taking away their shipments at the border and there was nothing they could do. And a lot of them killed themselves. The Canadian Mental Health Association held press conferences every time they were aware of a suicide in an effort to shame the government into allowing access to the product again, which eventually worked. But you know, if your life depends on a product, like literally depends on the product, and the government's taking it away, even if you have money, the court's money. You don't have time to go to court and then the DOJ is going to slow things down and come out with a whole bunch of experts and you're not going to get a quick order. You're going to be dead. But most people who depend on a specific medication, be it a chemical or be it a natural product, they don't have the money to go to court anyway or the wherewithal to do that and often People are sick and don't have the energy, we need some way. When your life is threatened, regardless of whether it's a chemical drug or a natural product, to be able to say, "Listen, my right to life supersedes some regulatory problem that Health Canada has with my access to the product," and the Charter of Health Freedom does that with the Health Freedom Ombudsman, and it's long overdue, it's absolutely crazy that if your life depends on a drug, you have no voice in Canada. Yes. And I have to say, I'm very impressed with the charter you've come up with. It definitely reflects a lot of deep thought in balancing the issue and providing Canadians with access to it, with putting it under the purview of a different department of the government that would be completely separate from Health Canada, the Ministry of Health, so they can go deal with the drugs, we'll have the Ministry of Wellness deal with these other products. Well, at the same time, yes, protecting people against fraud because as you say, there are going to be some snake oil salesmen or kind of come along and try to put something that's fraudulent on people. And you've even on the website, you've got some 40 different short videos on there that address everybody's questions about any aspect of this. So they can go to CharterOfHealthFreedom .org and they can watch all those videos. But the really important thing is to go there and download the petition, which they can do in three different languages, get people to sign it, and then the address to mail it to is right there on the page. Get it signed, send it back. 135 ,000 signatures already. We're looking for a quarter million. And this is where Canadians have got to get involved because we can reverse this. We can save our access to natural health products. You know and will a lot in your audience they'll have businesses like who cares if it's a tire shop has nothing to do with health get that petition out there and get your family and friends to sign it it's not hard. And you know if you don't fill out a page send it in like it doesn't have to be completely full. But you know do your best but I mean this is a real easy thing. And it's already incredible that we've got over a hundred and 130 ,000 already. This is resonating with Canadians. Get involved. It's something you can do. This is life and death, and we need to get this charter enforced. Absolutely. Shawn, thank you so much for the work that you're doing for your tireless efforts. Many people don't realize you've been at this for decades, protecting our rights to these kind of products. This is crunch time. This is where we make it or break it. If we do not reverse this legislation, we're going to lose our access to it. And people are going to be left with nothing but quite costably poisonous pharmaceuticals. So folks, if you're watching this right now, go to CharterofHealthFreedom .org, download that petition, get it signed, send it in. Shawn, thank you so much. Thank you, Will.