2.3 The purpose of this Act is to protect and promote the health and safety of the public and encourage accurate and consistent product representation by prohibiting and regulating certain activities in relation to foods, therapeutic products and cosmetics.A great deal of resistance to the bill seems to stem from an interpretation that envisions a sudden and sweeping criminalization of naturopathic and homeopathic practitioners and suppliers. This narrative sees regulation as a crackdown: a raiding (metaphorical and, potentially, literal) of formerly legitimate practices, and a very real threat to life and livelihood.
I'd like to suggest a different interpretation, or at least one that spells out the ramifications of a state authority seeking absolute regulatory control that the former never quite names. This interpretation rests on the language of the bill, a kind of vocalization without an identifiable speaker, which neglects to identify the key players who are in fact involved: stakeholders in pharmaceutical companies, medical professionals, and citizens wanting the autonomy to determine what does and does not go into their own bodies and the bodies of their family- and community-members.
First, a little note on method. I'm operating under the assumption that everyone, in any profession, is about as likely to be as corrupt or as honest as anyone else in any other profession. There's nothing intrinsically "good," at least in my view, about someone working at a church or temple, for example, just as there's nothing implicitly "bad" about anyone employed at a strip club. Priests have been charged for sex crimes (rare, of course, but true), while prostitutes have fought for safer working conditions and fairer pay. Simply put, what one does professionally should not be taken to indicate where one points her moral compass: what one does isn't necessarily the same as who one is.
More examples: both lawyers and politicians are often vilified even though many labour primarily for the public good; of teachers, we can all probably name some we've loved, and others we've despised. Our dentists we hate for what they do while we're in their chairs, even if they're great guys before (and after) the freezing, drilling, and so on. (I've had great dentists—and I'm not simply writing this out of fear for the next visit!) And we respect our doctors because of who they are: lifesavers, quite literally.
My argument isn't that nobody's perfect. It's that no profession is, really and truly, populated entirely by perfectly upstanding and ethically integral professionals. "Politician" and "doctor," two of the professions I want to discuss here, are no exceptions. Doctors are sometimes called "quacks," after all, and to be called a politician when one isn't is meant as an insult.
Returning to the bill, the problem with the language here is that "the Act" purports to "protect and promote" the "safety of the public." In reality, of course, such abstract decrees must be enacted by specific agents—the Act alone is only words, and only specific individuals must do the "protecting" or "promoting" of public safety, as the case may be. Individual police officers enforce "the Law" (another abstract concept), just as specific people, involved in specific situations, will translate and implement the general decrees of an Act.
If existing homeopathic practitioners are indeed excluded from the Act, or if their practices are rendered criminal as a result, this is a cause for alarm. It certainly smacks of a early 20th century prohibition, though I have my doubts in this case that OPP or RCMP agents will be busting open barrels of illegally smuggled feverfew or echinacea at the border.
More alarming, however, is the desire to strip self-determination ever increasingly from public control. I see little distinction between control over one's own physical, material body and one's political, social body. Stripping away rights under the premise of public protection, while not a new tactic, is nevertheless alarming. Perhaps instead of fearing widespread public duping by snake-oil (or goji berry) dealers, the government can give its public the benefit of the doubt.
Besides, the premise doesn't hold: the healthcare system in Ontario is overtaxed and overly regionally centralized to the point that state-based, supposedly "regulated," medical care is in tatters. Emergency room deaths make headlines, but are only the tip of the iceberg: more common are the thousands of patients held hostage to the slightest prescription-whims of certain family doctors. While I have no doubt that the vast majority of family physicians want to help their patients and wish only the best for them, I also know (for a fact based on family experience) that others want solely to reap the rewards of kickbacks from prescribing the latest and greatest anti-depressives, anti-coagulants, cholesterol fighters, and muscle relaxants, giving only a shoulder shrug to questions of whether these will interfere with current medication, and threatening to withdraw services if pressed on the issue.
Blanket regulation, then, is not the answer. Nor is, as some on the homeo-/naturopathic side might argue, complete deregulation. What's needed is an injection of public force into the arm of the body politic: greater participation, not simply representation, in developing and refining this legislation. This nation already suffers enough from ailments of excessive individualism.
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