DO IT YOURSELF

As of today, at 5 years and counting, Health Canada has taken 30,000 Natural Health Products (NHPs) off Canadian store shelves and the disappearing act is about to rapidly increase. Canadians are in imminent danger of losing access to thousands more, dramatically reducing our ability to care for ourselves. If you want your choice of NHPs to be maintained, you need to act now. It's easy to make a dramatic difference by sending in these letters.

TAKE ACTION: Download, cut and paste the text, add your own thoughts, print and send one, a few or all the letters at once. If we EACH take personal responsibility to send in the letters, or letters of our own, the impact would be great. Comments are more productive when they are polite and respectful of the politicians themselves. So don't just think about this campaign. Make the time to do it yourself.

DOWNLOAD: All of the 7 letters and read through them. Understand the message and importance of our mission

PRINT: Two copies of the letters you choose. Tri-fold them and tape closed
(Do NOT staple them), no envelope required.

ADDRESS & SEND: The 1st set to your Member of Parliament
at the House of Commons:

House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

CLICK HERE TO FIND YOUR MP

Remember! Use the House of Commons address. No stamp is required. Write their name and House of Commons address right on your folded print out.

ADDRESS & SEND: The 2nd set to the Minister of Health:

The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, P.C., M.P., Minister of Health. Health Canada, Brooke Claxton Building, Tunney's Pasture, Postal Locator 0906C, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0K9

To make the absolute best impression, adding your own personal sentence or two at the beginning of the letter is ideal. But if this is going to stop you from doing it, then please, just print and send. To have the best effect consider a personal opening statement. Cut and paste the letters you'll find below, into a new word document and compose your opening.

Express your desire to continue to exercise your democratic right to be healthy, before you lose it!

DOWNLOAD ALL 7 LETTERS NOW

WRITE IS MIGHT

DEADLINE: DO THIS TODAY! It was our hope to have the Health Minister and MPs offices flooded with letters when they got back into office September 15 2009 after summer. There were many letters that were sent. Please continue sending letters.

METHOD: To persistently send letters from across Canada expressing our concern as Canadian citizens. The more people who send letters to persuade our MPs to suspend and review the NHP regulations from all over Canada, the more powerful our message will be. And the more likely a dialogue on this topic will erupt and cause change.

CAMPAIGN PROGRESS: Letters are being sent, but many more are needed. Add your voice to the cause! Join thousands already writing and ramp up our chances of success.

GOAL: The goal is to overwhelm them with sheer volume. To inform and convince our MPs of the NHP regulations and what they are doing, what they plan to do, and how they are outright violating our freedom of choice, eliminating jobs and greatly limiting our wellness options. To introduce MPs to the Charter of Health Freedom, and pass it into law to protect us.

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Given their ultra low relative risk, Health Canada's wildly exaggerated level of regulatory concern over their NHPs indicates that the regulations are simply a witch hunt. Their true intentions are to dramatically downsize the Canadian NHP market and effective alternatives to pharmaceuticals. This makes perfect sense given the upcoming free trade deal between Canada and the European Union, (i.e. the purveyors of the CODEX treaty, and home to many mammoth pharmaceutical companies), and Health Canada’s preoccupation with “fulfilling their international obligations”.

If you want your choice of NHPs to be maintained, you need to act now.

REASON: It is incredibly important that our MPs know that we want to keep our options of Natural Health Products open, that we want to keep them free of pharmaceutical model regulations and that we're tired of our rights being ignored and violated by Health Canada officials.

RESULT: More NHPs on the market due to appropriate regulation and management; Canadian citizen rights observed and protected; Our elected officials making legal decisions about the healthcare system based on scientific, epidemiological and historical evidence.

MAKE THIS AN ELECTION ISSUE

Since 2004, the Natural Health Product Regulations have reduced the number of NHPs (Natural Health Products) that Canadians can purchase domestically from 70,000+ to less than 40,000. Of these, only approximately 10,000 have been licensed, most being single ingredient products. Tens of thousands of applications for multiple ingredient NHP combinations have sat unprocessed for years because according to Regulation guidelines, they cannot be approved.

Without a major public reaction most of these effective NHP combination products will simply disappear!

By applying assessment methods adapted from the pharmaceutical model, Health Canada is set to incrementally eliminate combination ingredient NHPs one license application at a time. In this process they will dramatically reduce health food stores' ability to compete by getting rid of specialty products, and eliminate thousands of health options for Canadians to protect themselves.

The licensing deadline for NHPs is early 2010. It will then become a criminal offense to sell a product without its NHP#, despite the fact that according to Canadian Poison Control statistics, there have never been any Canadian deaths attributed to NHPs.

As Canadians, if we want to stay well and be healthy, we can no longer tolerate Health Canada’s bureaucratic agendas.

Campaign Manager: Julia Rickert // julia.r@cnhc.ca

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