A potentially deadly ‘Tylenot’ gong show: Can Alberta’s UCP government be trusted to do anything right? 

Prediction: Every remaining drop of the screwball Turkish children’s medicine bought by Alberta’s United Conservative Party last year for give or take $100 million just to own the Libs is going to have to be poured down the drain.

This is because nothing kills consumer interest in a medicinal product faster than the possibility that using it might kill you or someone you love. 

So, in the wake of the Globe and Mail’s revelation yesterday that the kids’ painkiller imported by the UCP as a stunt to embarrass the Trudeau Government during a national shortage of children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen last year had the potential to kill newborn infants, no one is ever going to touch the stuff again. 

In addition to consumers as normally defined, that includes the governments of other jurisdictions, hospitals, pharmacies, or anyone except maybe landfill operators in the event it turns out to pose an environmental hazard to just flush the stuff down the drain – not that it seems likely environmental risk would bother the UCP all that much. 

Last May, Alberta Health Services ordered that the stuff made by Atabay Pharmaceuticals and Fine Chemicals Inc. of Istanbul during a national shortage of kids’ painkillers could no longer be used in neonatal intensive care units, an AHS spokesperson confirmed to the Globe.

Thankfully, no child appears to have been harmed by the medication. But even if the risk is small, it’s a deadbolt cinch yesterday’s news represents the end of any further interest anywhere, ever, in Alberta’s vast supplies of “Tylenot,” as the stuff soon came mockingly to be known.

Not only that, but it turns out the medications tasted so bad they probably didn’t even need the childproof caps Atabay didn’t have, the absence of which delayed deliveries until after the short window of need, the proximate cause of which was a surge or children’s respiratory disease last winter. 

Anyway, as the Globe’s reporters noted, Alberta’s huge stocks of Atabay ibuprofen will expire in November 2025 and the acetaminophen in January 2026, and nobody’s going to forget about this by then. 

The cost of the purchase and shipping has been variously reported as $75 million, $85 million or more. But who really knows? As a ballpark estimate, $100 million is a perfectly reasonable estimate. 

One thing we do know is that the mother of unsuccessful Trump-endorsed U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz was a director of the Turkish drug company at the time. Coincidence? We’ll probably never know.  

The goal of the purchase by the supposedly fiscally prudent UCP Government, as has been obvious from the get-go, was not to stock the empty shelves of Alberta pharmacies with medicine worried parents were anxious get home to their sick kids during a busy respiratory disease season. It was simply to embarrass the federal government – an effort that was partly successful.

On Dec. 6, 2022, Premier Smith used her announcement of the purchase to imply Ottawa was dragging its heels on approving the medicine. “We are working co-operatively with Health Canada and I urge them to expedite all necessary approvals in the coming days so we can load this massive shipment of pain relief medication on to the airplanes we’ve secured to bring this pain relief medication to Alberta families and children,” she said. “This is how a co-operative federalism should work.” (Emphasis added.)

When the first load of bottles showed up on Jan. 18, then health minister Jason Copping and then deputy premier Nathan Neudorf showed up at Edmonton International Airport to pose with the pallets of Parol, as Atabay’s children’s acetaminophen product was branded. “Kids and families are waiting for these medications and we need Health Canada to approve them without further delay,” the premier complained in that day’s news release.

“I’m so pleased Alberta parents and caregivers do not need to wait any longer,” she chirped in another news release on March 20. 

“This supply of children’s pain and fever medication will ensure Alberta pharmacy shelves are well stocked for years to come,” the same release boasted, a claim that is laughable in retrospect. 

Looking back at all the verbiage generated by the government on this topic suggests the UCP thought it had found the perfect issue with which to bash the federal government.  

Alas, the meds that made it here first turned out to be unsuitable to be administered by parents and so were restricted by Health Canada to use in hospitals. For one thing, they were a different strength than the familiar medicine temporarily in short supply. 

In the end, as the Globe reported, only 13,700 of 250,000 bottles shipped here were ever distributed to hospitals or pharmacies before AHS ordered staff stop using them.

NDP Childcare, Child and Family Services Critic Diana Batten, a Registered Nurse, said the premier “brutally mismanaged this deal from the very beginning.”

Ms. Batten noted that “this is the second serious episode of dangerous negligence from the UCP. The UCP slashed food inspections and in September, hundreds of Calgary children were sickened by E. coli at their daycare, sending dozens of children to hospital with serious illness and several requiring dialysis.”

So, yeah, the continuing Tylenot gong show legitimately raises the question of whether the UCP government is capable of doing anything right. 

Here’s a suggestion on the next move for Alberta’s government: Get rid of whatever bottles made it to Alberta right now. It’s just taking up space that could be used for something else.