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Behind Canada's uphill battle for a ban on cosmetic animal testing

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[Howcast]

While we’d like to think we left cosmetic animal testing in the rear view mirror in the ‘90s, the truth is it’s still legal in many regions of the world, including Canada.

Here at home, Sen. Carolyn Stewart Olsen has made efforts to change that. She introduced Bill S-214, the Cruelty-Free Cosmetics Act, in Parliament last June to not only make it illegal to conduct cosmetic animal testing in Canada but also to ban the sale of imported cosmetic products that were tested on animals.

According to animal protection organization Humane Society International, these tests, which are conducted for or by cosmetic companies and chemical producers, can see mice, rabbits, guinea pigs and rats blinded, force-fed substances and subsequently killed all without painkillers. In one of the larger tests, the reproductive toxicity test, up to 2,600 rats can be used, with generations of them killed. The organization believes these tests are flawed, unnecessary and don’t guarantee customer safety.

“There’s no need to conduct testing on cosmetics anymore,” Aviva Vetter, program and development officer of Humane Society International’s research and toxicology department, tells Yahoo Canada News. “Animals are not a fair representation of a human reaction. What works in an animal may not work in a human.”

After falling off the offer table due to the recent election, the Cruelty-Free Cosmetics Act is in its second reading in the Senate after Stewart Olsen reintroduced it in December, and it will have to finish making its way through the Senate and the House of Commons before it could become law.

Despite increased public awareness of animal testing decades ago, Canada isn’t the only country without laws in place to protect animals from cosmetic testing. In China, for example, not only is it legal to sell cosmetic products tested on animals, it is mandatory that all imported cosmetic products are tested on animals before they’re sold to consumers. So far, the European Union, Norway, Israel, India, New Zealand, Turkey and some Brazil states have full or partial bans on cosmetic animal testing.

The Canadian Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association (CCTFA) argues, however, that the testing of cosmetic products on animals has already been virtually eliminated worldwide with the exception of China.

“The cosmetic industry has probably the best record of any group of consumer products in the world of eliminating the use of animals in testing finished products or ingredients,” says CCTFA president and CEO Darren Praznik. “Probably close to 99.9 per cent of cosmetic products and ingredients testing does not require new animal testing data. Of that very small percentage that does, the vast majority of that would be using data that has already been collected from animal testing for other purposes.”

Stewart Olsen worked with Humane Society International and members of the cosmetics manufacturing industry to gather information on what other countries were doing regarding cosmetic animal testing and the possible implications that may occur if the bill were to pass.

“I assured them that I am open to amending this bill when it goes to committee so that we can come up with something that hopefully everyone would be happy with,” she explains. “We’re kind of down the middle on it with the provisions that allow for extenuating circumstances.”

Despite meeting with Stewart Olsen and providing her background material, the CCTFA has concerns about the bill in its current form as it may restrict the cosmetics industry from using new ingredients that were tested on animals for other reasons like health and safety.

“The senator’s bill would prevent us as an industry from using a new preservative or perhaps a new sunscreen when it wouldn’t add an additional animal to being used to prove safety because it will have already been [tested] for other purposes,” says Praznik, who is a former Manitoba provincial cabinet minister.

While the CCTFA is not opposed to having a bill and would be willing to support it if a few amendments were made, the organization doubts the bill would save a single animal.

“If the senator’s bill passes, we’ve been trying to identify if it would save one animal from being tested in Canada, and we have yet to find that animal,” Praznik explains.

While Stewart Olsen has been told there is a very small percentage of animal testing done in the country, she believes Canadians don’t want to see any animal cruelty and may still support the bill regardless. With over 110,000 signatures on Humane Society International’s Be Cruelty Free Canadian petition against cosmetic animal testing, Stewart Olsen of New Brunswick has good reason to believe so. But she is still aware of the concerns some may have around laws regarding animal rights.

“I’m from the province that has hunters, fishers and trappers, and they rely on that. I’m not an animal rights activist in a global way,” she says. “I’m trying to walk that fine line because I don’t want people to say that she’s against everything.”