My colleague representing the riding of Oakville, Terence Young, lost his 16-year-old daughter, Vanessa who tragically died of a heart attack while on a prescription drug.
This drug was deemed unsafe and removed from the market. Terence has championed changes to current drug monitoring and regulations resulting in our government forwarding Bill C 17 commonly known as Vanessa’s Law.
Vanessa’s Law will protect Canadian families and children from unsafe medicine by enabling the government to:
Require strong surveillance including mandatory adverse drug reaction reporting;
Recall unsafe products;
Impose tough new penalties for unsafe products, including jail time and new fines up to $5 million per day instead of the current $5,000;
Provide the courts with discretion to impose stronger fines if violations were intentional;
Compel drug companies to revise labels to clearly reflect health risk information, including updates for health warnings for children; and
Compel drug companies to do further testing on a product, including when issues are identified with certain at-risk populations namely, children.
I was there with MP Young celebrating the royal assent of this bill.
This was an emotional time for Terence, his wife, and son.
The sole purpose of his work on this bill was to help ensure no other family would have to live through the loss they experienced.
Canadians can be grateful for Terence Young’s commitment to this bill to protect Canadians.
Colin Mayes is the MP for Okanagan-Shuswap.
