Media Relations
June 27, 2022
The Chronic Pain Association of Canada has just completed a follow up survey to our 
2019 survey on the state of chronic pain patients in Canada.
Much to our dismay and not surprisingly, the situation has gone from bad to worse. Read about our findings here.
June 29th, 2021
Health Canada is sharing a survey for those with disabilities: Share your thoughts! Check it out here (PDF).
June 15th, 2021
We sent out a call for action to change the public conversation around pain.
With the assistance of Dr. Richard “Red” Lawhern PhD, a tireless patient advocate in the U.S., we are asking you to help again.
Find out how here (PDF).
June 10th, 2021
The federal Pain Task Force’s final report has rested, but only succeeded in wasting 3 years and regurgitating everything we already knew.
We are calling for the chronic pain community to immediately stand up and stop the continued cycle of pain, misery and death caused by the endorsement and enforcement of the guideline.
Read all about it here (PDF).
May 31st, 2021
We asked questions.
Read the reply from Andrew Taylor at Health Canada, and our response here (PDF).
May 11, 2021
The federal pain task force winds down, sort of, leaving nepotism and continued suffering. With the release last week of its third and final report, Health Canada’s Pain Task Force has finally finished rearranging the deck chairs on a ship that sank a decade ago.
Read all about it here (PDF).
March 29, 2021
CPAC previously reported on the total lack of support by the Canadian Medical Association of its members involved in the field of pain medicine in comparison to their counterparts in the United States.
So what was their response?
Read about it here (PDF).
March 24, 2021
Here’s some sage advice from a very experienced pain physician. Others should follow it. The individualized model should be the one being used.
Read their advice here (PDF).
March 11, 2021
In January 2020, we sent the registrar an open letter lauding them for their new policies on opioid tapering. What they said gave us hope, but reports from people in pain in Ontario are leaving us disturbed.
Read about those experiences here (PDF).
Feb 10, 2021
A recent study conducted by the University of British Columbia upholds everything that CPAC has been saying about the prescribing changes made by Health Canada to ostensibly reduce overdose deaths.
Read the full media release here (PDF)
Dec 9, 2020
We finally hear back on our FOI request: even the science the government defends says NO to pain prescription cutbacks.
True or false? Doctors triggered our overdose crisis...
November 2 2020
Second verse, same as the first. Just a little bit longer—and a whole lot worse.
The second report of Health Canada's Canadian Pain Task Force, just out, runs to 75 pages, yet fails once again to speak to the two million among us suffering serious chronic pain, or to the six million struggling with lasting pain that’s a little less severe. As usual, these eight million unfortunates—one in four adult Canadians—can’t look to government for help.
Read the full letter here (PDF)
November 2 2020
While the American Medical Association has rebuked the CDC guideline and the crackdown on Americans in pain, the CMA hasn't made a peep on behalf of deprescribed Canadians.
They replied by dusting off and sending us their five-year-old policy titled "Harms associated with opioids and other psychoactive prescription drugs...." Its every reference but one is at least ten years old.
We can't believe it either. So we wrote them back to say so.
October 2020
Mr. Martin Walterson is a chronic pain patient who has had his health and life destroyed by the misguided and dangerous policy commissioned by Health Canada and implemented by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) in a misguided, failed attempt to slow drug overdoses in Canada....Currently no doctor will prescribe the medication that this man was taking out of medical necessity that enabled him to live a reasonably decent life.
21 September 2020
WHY HAVE YOU ABANDONED PAIN PATIENTS WHILE U.S. DOCTORS SUPPORT THEM? We are of course referring to the very flawed and immoral opioid prescribing guideline first developed by the U.S. Center For Disease Control (CDC) with an impetus from the highly biased and zealous adherents of the Physicians for
Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP).This 2016 guideline has been criticized for its lack of scientific rigour and was allegedly introduced to deal with growing addiction and overdose deaths.
27 August 2020
Canada’s opioid overdoses are linked to less than two per cent of properly prescribed drugs, while Health Canada’s policy to prohibit prescribed opioids to Canadians who rely on them to mitigate pain only increases the death toll, according to a peer-reviewed study and a related commentary published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The CMAJ research is still being reported widely across Canada on social media and on major mainstream news platforms, including national TV news broadcasts.
12 August 2020
An analysis of the Canadian report, “Prescription Opioids” reveals how flawed and misleading the data is presented. The authoring agency even admits to this deception. Take a look at the first title, “Prescription Opioids.” Now take a look at the “Key Points.” The detrimental points are about illegal substances.
Prescription Opioids” reveals how flawed and misleading the data is presented. The authoring agency even admits to this deception. Take a look at the first title, “Prescription Opioids.” Now take a look at the “Key Points.” The detrimental points are about illegal substances.So why the misleading title? As revealed in the Pain News Network, The Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse and Addictions (CCSA) reports that 97% of pain patients use their opioid medications appropriately.
6 August 2020
The most recent report released by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) on opioid use in Canada, reveals how deceptively information and statistics regarding opioids can be used against pain patients by conflating the use of prescription medication with the illicit use of street drugs.
28 April 2020
The results are now in from an online survey of 2,221 people with chronic pain or chronic illness conducted by Pain News Network, the International Pain Foundation and the Chronic Pain Association of Canada from April 6-20.
29 January 2020
Dr. Nancy Whitmore, the registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), has informed CPAC that Ontario doctors would no longer be required to force taper chronic pain patients from their opiate medicines arbitrarily.
26 January 2020
After our last teleconference, we sent Andrea Currie, Canadian Pain Task Force Secretariat, an update on the status of two patients in Ontario that were mentioned in that call. One was the young lady who was the subject of a Chatelaine article and the other was Mr. Dan Wallace, the retired police detective and former member of the Canadian Military.
For Mr. Wallace, we mentioned that he was fired by his current doctor who has been busy tapering him against his will such that his blood sugar has become unstable and a concern to his endocrinologist who fears for his life. The increase in pain is causing the worsening of his diabetes.
8 January 2020
Is the new Canadian government finally deciding to get serious about rectifying the harms they have inflicted on chronic pain patients or is Prime Minister Trudeau;s mandate letter to the Minister of Health, Patty Hajdu, simply more verbiage?
9 December 2019
Chronic pain patients are in critical shape thanks to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the US and Health Canada in this country. However, there is one enormous difference. The American Medical Association (AMA) has come to the aid of their pain patients by refuting the claim that pain patients caused the overdose crisis and demanding an end to arbitrary dosing recommendations. The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) however, remains silent.
2 December 2019
Health Canada continues the unethical treatment of pain patients. Wrongly blamed for the increase of overdose deaths from illicit drugs, chronic pain patients have had their opiate medications forcibly reduced or stripped from them altogether and the results have been disastrous.
In the meantime, Justin Trudeau is open to granting the city of Vancouver $6 million to provide addicts with pharmaceutical grade heroin so that they have a safe supply.
4 November 2019
A 2019 survey by the Chronic Pain Association of Canada (CPAC) finds that chronic pain patients are experiencing a decline in quality of life, an increase in pain, the destruction of doctor-patient relationships, and suicide risks and attempts. In 2017, Health Canada commissioned a prescribing guideline for pain patients in a misguided attempt to combat overdose deaths. The reality is that coroners’ report that more than 92% of overdoses involve bootleg fentanyl, usually mixed with heroin and other street drugs, and alcohol (not "diverted" or stolen prescriptions). Medically-managed patients are not involved in overdoses yet their care has been decimated.
21 July 2019
The report underscores Health Canada’s knee-jerk reaction to what Ottawa calls the “opioid crisis”— medical opiates aren’t good for pain relief in the short or long term. They don’t work, and they caused the “crisis.” Right?
Wrong. But now Ottawa has assembled partisan “experts” to underwrite its fiction.
20 July 2019
For Scott McLeod, Registrar, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA)
I have talked with a good many Canadian patients who are now actively being denied safe and effective treatment with opioid analgesics, due to the draconian and scientifically unsupported policies of your Colleges. Several have been "deprescribed" despite the reality that there are no published trials data supporting positive outcomes for mandated tapering of opioids in otherwise stable patients...Further denial of pain care is simply MADNESS!
Read the full media release (PDF)
15 July 2019
Scott Stevens would give anything to live in the world Dr Scott McLeod described in his commentary for the Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Heraldon Friday.
McLeod, registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA), wrote that under his direction Alberta’s doctors are providing excellent, up-to-date care to Albertans in serious pain and no one should be going begging for help.
But Stevens, of Stony Plain, says he doesn’t live in McLeod’s idyll. Instead, he lives in hell.
8 July 2019
In order to deal with overdose deaths among illicit drug users, Health Canada decided to go after chronic pain patients and their doctors this in the purported belief that they could reduce deaths. The department’s website, press releases, TV advertising, and the Minister’s statements all make clear that Health Canada is blaming part of the increase in overdoses on some imagined increase in the use of prescribed opiate medicines by Canadian patients.
Prescribing of these drugs in Canada has, in fact, plunged.
2 July 2019
Unprincipled research continues to push a national trend to deprescribing opiate pain relievers for the million or so Canadians with high-impact pain, including children, who rely on the drugs to live.
In an audacious example, a presentation this past week at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Urologists in Quebec City claimed that post-surgical use of opiate analgesia carries significant risk of addiction and overdose.
2 July 2019
Citing a need for “safe supply” across Canada, some doctors in Ontario have started prescribing medical opiates to patients with addiction to keep them from dangerous street markets—while Ontarians and Canadians with intractable pain now go begging for these same therapeutic drugs.
13 June 2019
A large group of patients meeting in Edmonton this week has asked the Alberta health minister to investigate the medical regulator that licenses the province's MDs for its unwarranted and secret cautioning and sanctioning of doctors trying to prescribe for Albertans suffering severe and intractable pain and unable to live without medically-managed opiates.
Thousands of Albertans with pain have lost specialist and primary care because the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta has forced doctors to stop prescribing opiates. The province's pain specialists are retiring in large numbers, citing College intimidation.Read the full media release (PDF).
23 May 2019
In the last month, the American Medical Association, the FDA, the CDC, and the US Surgeon General have all called for an end to brutal policies that have been weaponized against millions of Americans, stripping them of the medical opiates they need to fight persistent pain. And on May 30, a US Department of Health and Human Services pain management task force will join this wave of national protest by releasing its own formal caution against deprescribing.
Read the full media release (PDF)
Read CPAC's Response letter to the Federal Minister of Health (PDF)
For more information, contact:
Barry Ulmer, Executive Director
Telephone (780) 482-6727 | Fax (780) 433-3128