“We have a company here in St. Catharines with 25 years of expertise making injectable cancer therapies being blocked from providing their products to Ontario’s hospitals by a large purchasing group with no accountability. That’s 25 years of good jobs and local manufacturing skill being threatened.” – St. Catharines NDP NPP Jennie Stevens.
A News Release from the Constituency Office of Jennie Stevens, MPP for St. Catharines Riding in Niagara, Ontario
Posted March 11tj, 2022 on Niagara At Large
St. Catharines NDP MPP Jennie Stevens
ST. CATHARINES, Ontario – MPP Jennie Stevens (St. Catharines) is calling on Ford to make the procurement of drugs and supplies for Ontario hospitals more transparent and to focus on buying Ontario-made products. This comes as St. Catharines-based Biolyse Pharma has been forced out of the Canadian market by the largest health care procurement buying group.
She was joined by NDP health critic France Gélinas and Biolyse Pharma president Brigitte Kiecken a press conference Thursday
“We have a company here in St. Catharines with 25 years of expertise making injectable cancer therapies being blocked from providing their products to Ontario’s hospitals by a large purchasing group with no accountability. That’s 25 years of good jobs and local manufacturing skill being threatened,” said Stevens.
“The pandemic showed us all that Ontario needs local capacity to make the medicines we need so that we don’t have to rely on other countries for critical health care.”
On Wednesday, Stevens introduced a motion in the legislature calling on the Ford government to prioritize and strengthen procurement from Ontario-based medical manufactures, and to look into the large purchasing groups that procure drugs for Ontario hospitals.
“We need to make sure Ontario can produce the drugs and health care supplies we need. We need to support companies like Biolyse and fix our broken health care procurement system,” said Stevens.
“Ford must pass my motion to prioritize local procurement for health care, and pass MPP Gélinas’ bill to bring transparency and accountability to health care procurement. Ford must act to help Biolyse, save jobs here in St. Catharines, and make our health system stronger and more transparent.”
Gelinas bill, the Transparent and Accountable Health Care Act (https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-42/session-2/bill-97) , expands the mandate of the Ombudsman and the Auditor General to any health organization that receives over $1 million from the provincial government in a year.
This applies to group purchasing organizations, hospitals, Ontario Health, independent health facilities, long-term care homes and more.
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Niagara At Large 
Sadly, Ford has a majority government and doesn’t have to do anything that doesn’t bounce back and give him and the Tories the financial kick-back that he wants. This is what we get when folks vote for a government whose only policy in 2018 was “buck-a-beer”. We can only hope that the voters of Ontario will be smarter this time around.
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