Cosmetic testing on animals will be banned in Canada in six months — a largely symbolic measure, which aligns Canadian policy with that of dozens of other countries.
The changes to the Food and Drugs Act were included in the omnibus “budget implementation” legislation, signed into law last week in Ottawa, and will come into force in December, federal Health Minister Jean -Yves Duclos, at a press conference in Toronto to mark the event.
“Today, Canada joins 43 other countries that have taken action to ban cosmetic testing on animals,” he said.
The new measures will ban the testing of cosmetics on animals in Canada in six months, but also the sale of new cosmetics that rely on data from animal testing to establish their safety, “with some exceptions”.
The law will also prohibit “false or misleading labeling” relating to these animal testing of cosmetics. These new measures are due to come into force on December 22, six months after the law was enacted.
“We rarely see policy changes where everyone agrees, where activists, industry, politicians and Canadians all agree,” said the minister.
Animal testing has fallen into disuse in the cosmetics industry in recent years, following a similar law in the European Union that was introduced some 20 years ago.
The regulations should not result in additional costs for companies selling affected products, such as creams, lotions and makeup, said Darren Praznik, CEO of the Cosmetics Industry Alliance of Canada.
“In fact, animal testing is no longer widely used by our industry — and has been for some time,” he said in an interview last spring when the bill was introduced.
Canada took time
When the European Union enforced its animal testing ban in 2004, millions of euros were invested in research to develop other ways to monitor the safety of cosmetics.
Despite this research, explains Mr. Praznik, the adoption of such a law in Canada has encountered many obstacles. In 2015, for example, a private member’s bill was introduced, but the cosmetics industry opposed it because its language was too vague.
“It was so poorly designed that if you made a dog or cat shampoo, you couldn’t try it on a dog or a cat to see if they liked it,” Praznik argued.
But once the industry started collaborating with animal rights groups, he said, a list of principles was put together that worked for everyone. From there, he said, Health Canada drafted the bill.
“The lesson here is that if you can bring together stakeholders from different sides of an issue and have the good will, you can usually find a way to get things done,” he said. declared.
Still, there are areas where animal advocates would like to see improvement. For example, the rules are not retroactive: products already on the market that originally used animal testing to establish their safety will not be removed from shelves.
Hilary Jones is Chief Ethics Officer at Lush Cosmetics, a company that has opposed animal testing since its inception. She would prefer that the authorities reject this old data and demand to start from scratch, testing existing products again, but this time using cruelty-free methods.
“We believe it is unscientific to test on animals. It is a very crude and old-fashioned tool. So we would like to see all cosmetics embrace new methods,” she says.
“But are we satisfied with this law? Absolutely ! »