Food, Health & Consumer Products of Canada > Policy & Regulation

Effective regulations to ensure Canadians get the best in safety, quality, and choice

Navigating the Canadian market presents unique challenges and opportunities for those in the consumer health products sector. Constant regulatory changes add costs and hinder innovation, diverting resources from product development to compliance efforts. This stifles growth and limits industry's ability to invest in new advancements.

Our consumer health regulatory team is dedicated to ensuring that over-the-counter and natural health products are regulated logically and effectively. We proactively engage with government and stakeholders to address key regulatory issues, striving to create modern policies that foster innovation and competitiveness. This collaborative approach aims to streamline regulations, enabling our members to adapt to new scientific and market demands more efficiently, providing Canadians with more on-shelf options.

Being a trusted partner with policymakers and stakeholders is crucial to our advocacy approach. Whether managing crisis communications during public health emergencies or engaging in candid exchanges with the government on regulatory and health policy, FHCP's effectiveness as the voice of Canada's consumer health products sector is rooted in our credibility, transparency, and solutions-oriented advocacy.

Self-care is healthcare

In Canada, our publicly funded healthcare system, once envied worldwide, now struggles under a growing and aging population. Years of short-term solutions have left nearly one in five Canadians without a family doctor and frequent reports of backlogged or closed emergency departments. Empowering Canadians to take more control over their health and reducing the burden on doctors and emergency rooms, self-care is a logical health policy response.

Our Blueprint for a National Self-Care Strategy offers a step-by-step approach to harnessing self-care benefits. We engage with all levels of government and stakeholders to highlight the importance of self-care, raise awareness, and drive government action towards a more efficient, accessible healthcare environment for all Canadians.

Learn more about the value of self-care.

The Self-Care Framework

Our members account for over half of the natural health products (NHPs) sold in Canada, including vitamins, minerals, herbal remedies, and smoking cessation products. These, alongside over-the-counter (OTC) medicines, help Canadians manage health conditions and reduce strain on the healthcare system.

Since 2016, Health Canada has been developing a Self-Care Framework to regulate these products consistently. The framework's three phases—updating NHP labels, reforming OTC regulations, and improving NHP regulations with cost recovery—proposed a logical sequence that we have strongly supported since introduction. We continue to advocate for aligning regulations and policy to the overarching goal of a consistent, risk-based, and sustainable framework that ensures consumer safety, efficacy, and quality. We continue to work with Health Canada toward developing this framework to enhance consumer confidence and support better health outcomes for all Canadians.

Ensuring consumer access

Early 2023, Canada found itself grappling with a “tripledemic” of COVID-19, influenza, and RSV. Shortages of children's pain relievers and cough medicines added to the strain. Thankfully, through a collaborative effort between our policy leaders, our members, and both federal and provincial governments, we managed to import emergency supplies, providing relief to parents nationwide by winter's end.

The scarcity of these essential products underscored their critical role in our healthcare system. As the crisis waned, we turned our attention to regulatory obstacles that left Canada vulnerable to shortages. Serving on the Health Minister’s Health Product Supply Chain Advisory Committee, we emphasized the need for regulatory reforms within the Self-Care Framework to bolster the resilience of Canada’s health product supply chain.

A trusted voice

Critical to our advocacy approach, FHCP is seen as a trusted partner by policy makers and stakeholders. In this role, we are called to testify before various parliamentary committees, offering industry's perspective on a variety of files that inform all aspects of our expertise, including the regulation of consumer health products.

We leverage these appearance as opportunities to underscore the benefits of regulatory cooperation and underscore the cumulative regulatory burden impacting health product manufacturers, advocating for alignment to foster stability and predictability.

See our recent appearance before the Standing Committee on International Trade on Canada's proposed biocides regulations.

See our recent appearance before the Standing Committee on Health on regulatory changes for natural health products.

Policy & Regulation for Health Products

Effective regulations to ensure Canadians get the best in safety, quality, and choice

Self-care is healthcare

The Self-Care Framework

Ensuring consumer access

A trusted voice

About FHCP

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