A new bill from the Alberta government aims to the end the province’s ban on the private purchase of human blood.
The bill will repeal the province’s Voluntary Blood Donations Act introduced by the now Opposition New Democrats in 2017.
Other provinces ban the sale of blood plasma. When it was banned for sale in Alberta the NDP argument was :
Currently, Canadian Blood Services collects plasma, but only has the capacity to create approximately 20% of the plasma products needed for Canada. They have indicated that the introduction of pay-for-plasma sites in other jurisdictions have decreased the amount of donations coming from volunteers.
Donor compensation may lead to a disconnected and fragmented national blood system. Without legislation there is also a risk that the voluntary blood donor pool that Canadian Blood Services relies upon to support our national blood system will be depleted. This may happen if donors are financially motivated to donate to a private collection clinic instead of donating voluntarily to Canadian Blood Services.
Canadian Blood Services was created to operate and manage the blood supply for the provinces and territories. Canadian Blood Services currently coordinates, collects, tests and processes blood components, and dispenses blood components and blood products to Canadian hospitals.
The federal government was going to outlaw the sale of blood plasma with Bill S-252. The last time it was debated in Parliament was September 2019. It went before the senate but wasn’t passed. Premier Jason Kenney and his government are free to appeal the ban in Alberta.
One of the reasons it even made it this far is plasma being sold across Canada became infected with HIV.
After the devastating tainted blood scandal of the 1980s, in which nearly 30,000 Canadians were infected with hepatitis and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Canadian governments promised to never let such a tragedy happen again. A Royal Commission into tainted blood found that profiteering and lax standards contributed to the entry of tainted blood into the blood supply.
