"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice, after taking a drink from the bottle labelled Drink Me in Lewis Carroll's book, Alice in Wonderland. She was detaching from reality, imagining herself becoming a telescope, with her feet far, far away. Of course this was a fantasy. Alice had an excuse for her delusions-after all, she drank from the Drink Me bottle. Reading the paper every day, I find our own world getting curiouser and curiouser.

When I was growing up, I believed government existed to protect us from harm and to look out for the best interests of all of its citizens. After all, don't we pay the salaries of bureaucrats to do just that?

In 1999, more than 200 Health Canada scientists sent a letter to Allan Rock, then Canada's Minister of Health, saying that they were very concerned about the erosion of safety standards at Health Canada, risking the health of Canadians. The rapid approval of hormones and other drugs for use in foodproducing animals, and genetically modified foods for humans, without extensive safety testing, were examples of their concerns.

In July 2004, I read about Drs. Shiv Chopra, Margaret Haydon and Gerard Lambert getting fired as scientists with Health Canada. The three had been involved in a series of high-profile clashes with Health Canada over undue industry influence. These scientists also had the nerve to say that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were bad for us and our environment and criticized Monsanto's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, which eventually led to a Senate inquiry and a decision not to approve the drug.

I believe it is reasonable and responsible for publicly paid scientists to be cautious and to be forthcoming with any concerns. The Precautionary Principle in the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act states, "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation." Does Health Canada follow this overriding principle? Apparently not.

Health Canada bases decisions on science that is paid for by the industry they are regulating, and then claims to be closely monitoring the situation. For example, they "closely monitored" the drug Carbadox, approved in the 1970s for use in pig farming and shown to cause cancer in rats. However, in the year 2000 the European Union threatened to deny the import of Canadian pork unless Canada addressed the Carbadox cancer problem.

Currently, natural health product (NHPs) regulations require, among other things, research costing hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars per product. This is a drop in the bucket for multi-national drug companies but perhaps an economically fatal obligation for small NHP manufacturers.

Why is our government severely regulating NHPs, which don't kill people and have been used in some cases for thousands of years, when, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, annual deaths from properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the industrialized world?

The situation is getting curiouser and curiouser. When government servants are abdicating their responsibility to protect the public interest first, what would Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts say?

Milt Bowling is president of the Clean Energy Foundation and Chair of the HANS Electromagnetic Task Force.

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