GI-2025-26-reg3: Regulations Amending the Precursor Control Regulations (Increased Regulatory Oversight)

The roughly 429 licensed and registered dealer sites across Canada — spanning pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical distributors, fragrance and flavouring companies, and importers — are the primary businesses affected, with 90% of them classified as small businesses. The biggest ongoing cost is the employee screening requirement: about 10% of the 355 affected companies will need to build or formalize processes to check whether employees with access to precursors have relevant criminal convictions, costing an estimated $197,000 per year across that group, or roughly $554 per small business annually on average. Businesses will also need to file written reports with Health Canada within 72 hours any time they spot a suspicious transaction, keep those reports for two years, and maintain records of their employee screening steps even after their licence or registration lapses. Importers of pill press components like punches, moulds, and dies face a new pre-importation registration requirement for each shipment — estimated at about 45 minutes of paperwork per registration across roughly 1,200 annual imports — and pharmacies must now keep ephedrine/pseudoephedrine single-ingredient products behind the counter, while combination cold products must have a pharmacist available to customers on request.