An information commissioner has ordered Newfoundland & Labrador to release billing records for more than a thousand doctors under Access To Information. The province’s medical association says it may challenge the disclosure: “I’m certain that this will go to court”.
The Department of Employment proposes to interview poor Canadians to gauge effectiveness of federal aid programs. The initiative follows a Senate motion to investigate a guaranteed annual income program: ‘They know the answers already’.
Weekly newspapers are appealing for more taxpayers’ subsidies and new tax credits. The Department of Canadian Heritage currently pays millions in annual grants to corporate owners of weekly chains: “It does make sense to us”.
MPs have called up final debate on legislation to repeal two Conservative union bills. The Canadian Labour Congress had said delays in repeal slowed union drives: ‘It was a back-door, sneaky approach to governing’.
Canadians are denied lower-cost air travel because of federal limits on foreign ownership, says the chair of a Canada Transportation Act review panel. Current law limits foreign investors to 25 percent ownership in any Canadian commercial airline: “It’s difficult enough”.
Cabinet was asked to recall Parliament this past summer to force an end to a Canada Post contract dispute, says Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk. The post office said it never asked for back-to-work legislation. A similar bill was struck down as unconstitutional: ‘Both sides thought the government would rush in’.
Environment Canada is testing municipal wastewater for dozens of chemicals including a soap additive targeted for a nationwide ban by the Canadian Medical Association. The department has acknowledged some sewage plants may be in breach of the Fisheries Act: “Wastewater systems have to deposit somewhere”.
MPs have defeated a bill banning replacement workers in strikes or lockouts in federally-regulated work sites. New Democrat supporters cited one of the longest ongoing strikes in the country, at Atlantic Canada’s largest daily newspaper, as justification for the bill: “Any readers that are left will have lost the quality paper of old”.
In 2020 the last of the big Pfizer Inc. patents on Viagra will expire in the U.S. and the retail price of the little blue pills will collapse from $25 to mere pennies. Viagra revenues in the U.S. have averaged $2 billion a year. What is industry to do? “Disease mongering,” writes Thea Cacchioni, assistant professor at the University of Victoria.
In a damning exposé Cacchioni accuses pharmaceutical companies of a feverish search for unproven cures for a dubious “illness”, FSD: female sexual dysfunction. Big Pharma is a no-nonsense account of the campaign for a “pink Viagra”.
Viagra was one of the great chemical moneymakers of all time. Faced with the inevitable loss of patents – Viagra rights have already expired in the European Union and Canada – the clock is ticking: “Big Pharma has dedicated millions of dollars to the search for a sexual enhancement drug for women,” Cacchioni writes. “Viagra has not been a panacea for the vast majority of men’s sexual problems, and its risks have turned out to be much greater than Pfizer Inc. would have us believe – including loss of eyesight and increased rate of heart attacks. Yet the drug industry has gone to great lengths to cash in on the estimated US $1.7 billion market for sex drugs for women.”
Dr. Cacchioni is not a chemist but a sociologist. She has organized conferences on women’s sexuality, and testified at public hearings of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration on the phenomenon of chemical “cures” for phantom diseases like FSD – the kind of hearings that don’t occur at Health Canada.
Take Flibanserin, approved only last week by U.S. regulators as treatment for “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” in women. Cacchioni concludes that clinical trials were subjective; many women who took the drug complained of insomnia, fatigue, dizziness and nausea; and it isn’t obvious any drug is necessary in the first place. The campaign for pink Viagra reflects the “medicalization of sexuality,” she writes.
“Sexual medicine clearly emphasizes the bio, then the psycho, and rarely the social theorizations of sex and the body,” Big Pharma asserts; “Contrary to the drug industry and the medics it funds, sexual ‘shortcomings’ have not been eliminated by providing men a blue pill and women a pink one”; “Understanding sexual problems as simply the result of poor blood flow, hormonal imbalance or the short-circuiting of neurological hardwiring ignores key social, economic and political factors that shape sexual pleasure and displeasure.”
Most damning is the evidence most often cited by FSD proponents that a staggering 43 percent of women suffer from sexual dysfunction. The figure has been cited more than a thousand times, by Cacchioni’s count. Yet it is based on a single 1994 survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that asked women if they had experienced any sexual difficulties in the past year: “For example, if they lacked interest in sex, felt anxious about their sexual performance, had trouble with lubrication, failed to orgasm, came too quickly, or experienced pain during intercourse.”
Any number of factors might account for those symptoms: kids, the economy, Visa bills, you name it. “The 43 percent statistic came from assuming that an answer of ‘yes’ to any one of those questions was grounds for categorizing the respondent as having FSD”. Oh, and two of the authors of the survey had financial ties to Pfizer.
Big Pharma is smart and crisp, and of compelling interest to every Canadian interested in sex or money – so, pretty much everybody.
By Holly Doan
Big Pharma, Women and the Labour of Love by Thea Cacchioni; University of Toronto Press; 152 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-11375; $21.95
The Department of Canadian Heritage is prepared to order thousands of foreign-made flags to observe the nation’s 150th birthday in 2017. One Conservative MP described the contract notice as shocking: “These flags should be made in Canada”.
Credit unions have opposed any revival of postal banking, says a member of a federal task force on Canada Post reforms. The panel concluded banking was not feasible, though federal research concluded it can be profitable: “They were not looking for more competition”.
Federal agencies have spent millions on Facebook ads and other social media sponsorships though government research shows most taxpayers never see them. A defence department study found Canadians were more likely to rely on “word of mouth” than use Twitter and Facebook: “Government advertising shouldn’t be a Wild West Show”.
Mandated cockpit-style recorders in locomotives will impact employees’ right to work free of company surveillance, say Teamsters. Commons New Democrats endorsed the protest against voice and video recorders, recommended by federal crash investigators: “I am deeply troubled by it”.
Cabinet is still weighing an RCMP union bill amended by the Senate to expand Mounties’ bargaining rights. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the amendments represented a “big change”.
A federal task force on Canada Post is accused of burying the corporation’s own data in support of postal banking. Union executives yesterday asked a Commons committee to order the release of confidential research that rated post office banks a win-win: “You can see for yourself”.
