Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation Neglects to Mention Sponsor
filed in Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation, Pharmaceutical Industry on Dec.04, 2008
Why is the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation hiding its biggest corporate funder? If you look at the “Partners and Corporate Contributors” section of their website, you see a fairly innocuous-looking list of corporate contributors:
The Frank Cowan Foundation
CIBC
CIBC World Markets Children’s Foundation
RBC Financial Group
Scotiabank
TD Bank Financial Group
That’s the whole list. But delve into their official Annual Report, which isn’t legally allowed to lie or mislead quite so easily, and suddenly there’s a different corporate name right at the top of the list, more than double any other contributors: AstraZeneca Canada Ltd, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
But gosh, why would this research foundation, that’s heavily funded by taxpapers and dedicated “to improve the well-being of Canadians”, not want the general public to know it’s simultaneously deeply in bed with Big Pharma? It’s the kind of thing you’d think they’d be proud of.
December 5th, 2008 on 1:25 pm
Having the banks involved doesn’t make me exactly comfortable, either.
December 5th, 2008 on 2:11 pm
Haha, good point! Maybe “innocuous-looking” wasn’t quite the right descriptive for them there… “relatively unmedicated”?… “comparatively indirectly implicated”?…
June 28th, 2009 on 9:53 pm
He’s here.. he’s there… he’s everywhere – Scotiabank Man ! http://scotiabank.com/cda/content/0,1608,CID8442_LIDen,00.html