In Canada, when a doctor hands you a prescription, you trust that what’s been recommended is the best drug for your health. What you can’t know is whether your physician has benefited financially from a relationship with the company that made the drug — and whether that relationship has affected the drug advice you got.

While several countries mandate that pharmaceutical companies must publish all monetary transactions to doctors, Canada has no such system of public accountability. Eight years after a failed attempt in Ontario to fix this through legislation, there’s been little progress toward effective public reporting of doctor-drug company relationships in this country.

The Investigative Journalism Bureau consulted a public registry in the United States for information about 22 Can

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