Competition Bureau Response to Complaints of Pharmaceutical Anti-Competition Behavior: Tough Luck!
By Grace Joubarne and Christine Massey
Stop Psychotherapy Takeover’s (SPT) most recent initiative in the fight to stop the elimination of some 10,000 holistic, traditional, energy and spiritual care practitioners in Ontario was a new Submission, roughly 700 pages, sent by courier to the Competition Bureau on July 17th, 2016.
Our Submission requested a thorough investigation of Ontario’s corrupt and deadly healthcare system. It detailed how and why Ontario residents are all in grave danger on many healthcare flanks – including, (a) psychotherapy legislation that is slated for proclamation any day now, designed to monopolize all mental healthcare in the hands of psychiatrists and psychologists, (b) a more recent initiative to eliminate thousands of holistic healthcare clinics and wellness locations, and (c) the fact that unaccountable, medical/pharmaceutical-front corporations are inappropriately dictating healthcare policy for the people of Ontario.
If you’d like a copy of this highly informative Submission document, please contact us at [email protected].
Widget not in any sidebars
Disappointingly, but to no great surprise, we received a resounding ‘tough luck’ from the Competition Bureau by telephone (hear the conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tiM5uBxRgc), followed by written confirmation that they will not be pursuing any enforcement action or putting their decision in writing.
Competition Bureau officials stated that provincial politicians and government are not subject to any Competition Act provisions. The clear implication is that cartels are free to create monopolies in Canada simply by inserting representatives into key government positions (such as Ministry of Health).
Interestingly, the Bureau Officers failed to comment on their ability to investigate the non-governmental front corporation called FHRCO, which you will read about further below.
Are provincial governments really immune from investigation and prosecution, even when anti-competitive behavior is undertaken under the cover of invalid laws, as is the case in this healthcare scandal? Our investigation continues because according to the Competition Bureau’s own website, they specify that regulatory conduct under valid laws are not the jurisdiction of the Competition Bureau, acknowledging there is a distinction.
Regardless, Competition Bureau staff have a creative name for this sort of anti-competition corruption: Regulatory Capture.
Regulatory Capture is a form of government failure that occurs when a regulatory mechanism created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is intended to regulate. It is the process by which regulations and agencies eventually come to be dominated by the very industries they were charged with regulating.
The Competition Bureau officials indicated that they may eventually ‘advocate’ on this issue. However, not only do they claim that they are unable to take enforcement action against any government, but in this case, they won’t know for quite a while if this issue will be considered important enough to ‘advocate’ about.
Ontario’s Health Regulatory Colleges are Unaccountable Corporations
Research for the Submission uncovered many complexities in our corrupt Ontario healthcare legislative scheme. For example, regulatory colleges, like the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, are corporations (‘bodies corporate’), unaccountable to the residents of Ontario and not remotely transparent. They are not subject to FIPPA (FOI requests and privacy requirements), not subject to the Corporations Act, and soon will not be subject to the Not-for-Profit Corporations Act. More recently, we learned they are also not subject to the Competition Act.
More Corporate Influences on Ontario’s Regulation of Healthcare Practitioners
Yet another private corporation, one that goes by a government-sounding name but is completely outside the legislative framework with no government mandate whatsoever, has been for years heavily influencing the Ministry and individual Colleges, but never registered as a lobby group. This private corporation is called Federation of Health Regulatory Colleges of Ontario (FHRCO) and is run by Registrars of the various colleges, who themselves are corporate employees, the most influential among them direct from the pharmaceutical and medical corporate groups.
These Registrars are often strategically-employed advocates of the medical/pharmaceutical cartel, and they use their association with the colleges to project an undeserved air of legitimacy and authority onto FHRCO. Few of them have any experience in the actual provision of healthcare.
FHRCO’s agenda seems focused on eliminating all unregulated practitioners and any inconvenient regulated practitioners (the non-biomedical or independent-minded ones) through unlawful and fraudulent/invalid legislation. It doesn’t stop there, as FHRCO openly engages in smear campaigns disguised as ‘education’: Propaganda designed to turn the public against natural treatment practitioners.
FHRCO promotes the design and use of unjustified registration and membership requirements that they pressure individual colleges to adopt. Shenda Tanchak, former Executive Advisor to the medical doctors (College of Physicians and Surgeons) and ringleader of the Ontario Clinic Regulation Working Group discussed below, currently presides over FHRCO as President.
We brought the actions of this private corporation to the attention of the Competition Bureau in our Submission. Since the FHRCO is not a government agency or mandated by the government, we fully expected an investigation…but again, the Bureau seems to have given FHRCO a free pass on anti-competition behaviour.
Ontario Clinic Regulation – it doesn’t get more fascist than this
The Ontario Clinic Regulation Working Group’s ‘consultation report’, and their ‘recommendation report’ are now with the Minister, ready to be rubber-stamped and moved to the next stage, which will most likely mean more unlawful legislation buried in yet another huge Omnibus bill. The clinic regulation project is a group of 13 College Registrars working outside their mandate with the express intent of outlawing all places where health and wellness services are provided by unregulated practitioners, such as Reiki, mediation, yoga, hypnosis services.
In other words, this group proposes to eliminate thousands of holistic services from Ontario for no particular reason, except that it is clear they are interfering with pharmaceutical profiteering.
These regulations would, in effect, make everything from Reiki to hypnotherapy, pet-assisted therapy to counsellors, meditation and holistic education to spiritual care, illegal. Worse, the group wants to impose mandatory moral character evaluations on all regulated practitioners, except of course, dentists, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses…the ones so often cited for questionable ethics and morality.
This is yet another angle from which our fundamental freedoms are under attack and it traces back to FHRCO at least as early as 2008. The Ontario Clinic Regulations Working Group is headed by none other than FHRCO’s current president, the above-mentioned Shenda Tanchak. Their project is force-funded via the fees extorted from the Members of the Registrars’ 13 colleges.
For more info visit: http://www.stoppsychotherapytakeover.ca/ontario-clinic-regulation
Final Thoughts
Assuming that the Competition Bureau’s claims are accurate, and provincial governments really are immune from investigation and prosecution under the Competition Act, this begs the question: Was the Competition Act framed to allow anti-competition and monopolizing behavior via the provincial government?
However this situation came about, we now have a morally and ethically bankrupt Ontario government and its front corporations designing all manner of anti-competition legislation and policies that violate our Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms, without any worries of being held accountable for the horrific financial and emotional distress they are causing Ontarians.
It seems that the ONLY avenue left for turning this situation around is Court. And we need to raise the money now, before more innocent healthcare providers are ruined and their clients left with fewer and fewer healthcare options.
Friends, freedom isn’t free, and neither is defending it, so please consider making a donation to support our mission at www.StopPsychotherapyTakeover.ca .
These corrupt provincial actions are the template being used right across Canada. YOU and/or your loved ones will be affected…the only question is HOW SOON.
The Stop Psychotherapy Team,
Grace Joubarne and Christine Massey
[email protected]
