Regulatory oversight of human pathogens and toxins in Canada

Bank of Canada Oversight Activities

Regulatory and judicial oversight of nonprofit hospitals.

The modern hospital bears little resemblance to its ancestors. The charitable institutions of the 19th century mainly tended, rather than treated, the sick, and they served mostly poor patients, whereas the wealthy received care at home. The transformation of hospitals “from places of dreaded impurity and exiled human wreckage into awesome citadels of science and bureaucratic order”1 occurred d...

Regulatory Oversight and Safety of Probiotic Use

Depending on intended use of a probiotic (drug vs. dietary supplement), regulatory requirements differ greatly. For dietary supplements, premarketing demonstration of safety and efficacy and approval by the Food and Drug Administration are not required; only premarket notification is required. Saccharomyces boulardii is a probiotic regulated as a dietary supplement intended for use by the gener...

Regulatory Quality Under Imperfect Oversight

We analyze the positive and normative implications of regulatory oversight when the policymaking agency can improve the quality of regulation through effort, but only some kinds of effort are observable by the overseer, and the overseer’s only power is the ability to veto new regulation. Such oversight can increase the quality of agency regulation, but it also introduces inefficiencies—–the age...

Unfinished business: ongoing ethical exceptionalism in the oversight of human pluripotent stem cell research in Canada.

In this article, we critically examine the arguments for and against the exceptional status given human pluripotent stem cell research in Canada (through the latest [December 2010] revision of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans), and conclude that this exceptionalism is unwarranted and ethically unsound. In our view, the three federal research granti...