Bill C-224 Food and Drugs Act (Natural Health Products)
C-224 An Act to Amend the Food and Drugs Act (Natural Health Products)
Bill Type: Private Member’s Bill
Bill Sponsor: Blaine Calkins (Ponoka—Didsbury)
Status: Outside the Order of Precedence — First Reading September 18, 2025. This Bill hasn't passed yet.
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WHO GAINS POWER
- Natural health product manufacturers and sellers gain exemption from the therapeutic product monitoring regime — fewer compliance requirements, inspections and reporting obligations
- The natural health products industry gains retroactive protection — no charges can be laid for offenses committed between the 2023 Budget Act and this Bill coming into force
WHO LOSES POWER
- Health Canada loses the authority to apply therapeutic product oversight rules to natural health products — including post-market surveillance, mandatory adverse reaction reporting and inspection powers that came with the 2023 Budget Act changes
- Consumers lose the regulatory protections that come with therapeutic product classification — independent safety monitoring, mandatory incident reporting and enforcement tools
WHO GAINS MONEY
- Natural health product companies save on compliance costs — the therapeutic product regime is significantly more demanding than the existing natural health product framework
- Companies facing potential charges under the 2023 rules are retroactively shielded — no fines or penalties for that period
WHO LOSES MONEY
- No direct financial provisions affecting consumers or government revenue in this Bill
THE CATCH
- ⚠️ This Bill is unlikely to pass — it is an opposition Private Member's Bill introduced by a Conservative MP in a Liberal-majority Parliament
- ⚠️ The 2023 Budget Act expanded Health Canada's oversight of natural health products — this Bill directly reverses those changes, returning natural health products to a lighter regulatory framework
- ⚠️The 2023 rules this Bill reverses were introduced to address documented safety problems— including contaminated, mislabelled and counterfeit natural health products. This Bill removes those tools with no replacement safety mechanism.
- ⚠️ The retroactive amnesty provision is significant — offenses committed after the 2023 Budget Act came into force cannot be prosecuted. Companies that violated the new rules during that window face no consequences
- ⚠️ Natural health products are not the same as food but are treated more like food than drugs under this Bill — vitamins, supplements and herbal remedies would no longer be subject to the same post-market safety monitoring as prescription drugs
- ⚠️ No safety threshold or harm trigger is included — the exemption is blanket. There is no mechanism to pull a natural health product back into therapeutic product oversight if safety concerns emerge, short of new Legislation
- ⚠️ Nicotine replacement products remain classified as therapeutic — the Bill carves them out explicitly, which is the one safety line it holds