Terence Young

His great uncle Denton Massey represented the riding of Greenwood in Toronto in parliament from 1935 until 1949, and is related to Raymond Massey.

The bill has been reintroduced through subsequent parliamentary sessions up to the most recent, the 41st Canadian Parliament, 2nd session, but has never advanced to become law.

Terence Hart Young (born July 24, 1952) is a politician in Ontario, Canada.

He received his B.A. in Political and Social Science from York University in 1975 and attended Osgoode Hall Law School for one year, before pursuing a business career.

He worked for Ford Motor Company in sales, was a General Motors Sales Master and was licensed by the American Federation of Musicians to book Canadian musicians through Music Shoppe International.

Before politics Young also worked as a manager for Bell Canada.

He lives in Oakville with wife Gloria whom he married in 1980.

They raised three children, daughters, Madeline and Vanessa; and son, Hart.

Previously, Young was a Progressive Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario between 1995 and 1999.

Young was born in Toronto, Ontario.

His father was an Anglican minister at St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto's west end.

Young's mother Judith is a member of the Massey family.

Young was elected for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario to the provincial legislature in the 1995 election, defeating incumbent Liberal Barbara Sullivan by 16,644 votes in Halton Centre amid a PC Party of Ontario sweep of the region.

He served as a backbench supporter of the Mike Harris government.

He served as Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Education for three years with responsibility for Colleges and Universities, and then as Parliamentary Assistant to Finance Minister.

Young was part of a "family values caucus" in the Progressive Conservative Party, a group of right-wing members which included Jim Brown, Jack Carroll and Frank Klees.

The group promoted legislation that sought to impress a certain moral view in Ontario society.

Young said, "family values are things you have to discuss all the time. We didn't have any specific commitment to any family values legislation in the election campaign. But individual candidates like myself may have."

In 1996, the Harris government reduced the number of provincial ridings from 130 to 103.

As a result, some MPPs from the same party were forced to compete against one another for re-nomination.

Young ran for the Progressive Conservative nomination in the new constituency of Oakville, but lost to fellow MPP Gary Carr, 651 votes to 432.

In 1997 and 1998, Young twice sponsored a private members bill called the Zero Tolerance for Substance Abuse Act which would have required school principals to automatically suspend students if they were caught with cigarettes, alcohol or drugs.

Both times the bill didn't make it past second reading.

Young criticized the Halton School Board for approving Joyce Carol Oates's novel, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, for Grade Twelve English.

Young admitted he had not read the book but had seen excerpts which he characterized as pornographic and obscene.

Young's fifteen-year-old daughter Vanessa died in 2000 after taking the Johnson & Johnson prescription drug cisapride (brand name in Canada: Prepulsid).

Young became a consumer advocate after this incident, and has been fighting for a more stringent and protective drug-monitoring system in Canada.

He founded Drug Safety Canada to advocate for safe prescription drugs, and also initiated a hundred million dollar class action lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and Health Canada in 2000, and an individual lawsuit, later settled after a six-year court battle.

Young served as President of the Lewis Garnsworthy Tower, a not-for-profit supportive housing residence for seniors in Toronto, and on the board of St. Hilda's Towers from 2001 to 2013.

He was vice-chair of the Ontario Association of Former Parliamentarians (2001) and Founding President of Policy Alliance Inc., a government relations firm (2001).

Young endorsed Frank Klees's bid to become leader of the PC Party of Ontario in 2004, who lost to John Tory; Christine Elliott in 2009, who lost to Tim Hudak; and Christine Elliot again in 2015, who lost to Patrick Brown.

He was a Conservative member of the House of Commons of Canada from 2008 to 2015 who represented the riding of Oakville.

This story is told in detail in Young's 2009 book Death by Prescription.

He introduced a Private member's bill on April 20, 2009, to establish an independent drug agency for Canada similar to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission or the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, focussing solely on prescription drug safety.

After earlier government legislation had died on the Order Paper at the dissolution of the 39th Canadian Parliament, Young conceived and sponsored Bill C-17, An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act — Protecting Canadians from Unsafe Drugs Act (Vanessa's Law), named for his late daughter, which received Royal assent on November 6, 2014.

The law gives Health Canada powers to order drug companies to provide clearly worded safety warnings to patients and doctors for all drugs in plain language, to change drug labels for drugs on the market to clearly reflect new safety information, to conduct new studies on drugs that have shown safety concerns, to take unsafe drugs off the market and the supply chain within 48 hours, and to compel health care institutions to report all serious adverse drug reactions to Health Canada.

It also, amongst other powers, allows the Minister of Health to compel drug companies to make confidential business information (CBI) on their drugs available to specific entities such as the provinces and researchers, when patients are at risk of serious harm.

The law also provides for fines, the level of which is at a court's discretion, for criminal negligence that harms patients.

Authors in the Canadian Medical Association Journal have noted concerns with the enforcement of drug reaction reporting the law requires, with heretofore onerous reporting methods leading to low rates of report (5%), and suggesting "Reports for adverse drug reactions must be simple and quick to complete, and support clinical decisions at the point of care".

Others have suggested the law will fail as it excludes natural remedies.