A proposed ban on paid blood donations is dangerously late now that a pay-for-plasma clinic has opened in Ontario, opposition parties said after Health Minister Deb Matthews introduced legislation Thursday.

The bill follows months of chatter between the Health Ministry and Canadian Plasma Resources, which began training staff at a downtown Toronto clinic Tuesday despite warnings from Matthews that the Liberal government plans to shut it down.

“They have opened their doors, they have welcomed their first donors,” NDP health critic France Gelinas (Nickel Belt) told Matthews in the legislature.

“With her delay in putting forward this bill, she failed at her most important task of all and that is to protect our health care system.”

Matthews said her Voluntary Blood Donations Act, if passed in the minority parliament, would make it illegal to pay for blood and plasma donations, boost the government’s enforcement powers if violations are found and expand the criteria for licensing blood collection facilities.

“We don’t allow payment for organs. We don’t allow payments for any other body parts. We should not pay for blood,” she told reporters, saying this is the best way to protect the voluntary blood donation regime developed after the tainted blood scandal of the 1980s.

“What is important to me is that we do not develop a system where we have a parallel paid and voluntary system. I believe very strongly that that could put our voluntary system in jeopardy.”

The Krever Commission into the blood scandal, which left 30,000 Canadians with HIV and hepatitis C from questionable donations, recommended in 1997 that donors of blood and plasma should not be paid, except in rare circumstances.

Progressive Conservatives said the long-planned Canadian Plasma clinic, which is proposing to pay donors $25 but has not yet handed out money to any during the training phase, has “raised serious questions” for months.

“This legislation should have been debated long before now,” said MPP Jane McKenna (Burlington).

Canadian Plasma has maintained it does not need a licence under Ontario’s lab and specimen collection act, and that the province is already importing blood products made from paid plasma donations in the United States.

“This legislation means that Ontario’s patients will remain dependent on American companies for these lifesaving drugs,” chief executive Barzin Bahardoust said in a statement Thursday. “It is irresponsible to design a healthcare system over-reliant on paid donors abroad, where we have no regulatory oversight.”

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Bahardoust has said Canadian Plasma will comply with any new laws and move operations to another province, such as Manitoba, that allows paid blood donations.

With files from Richard J. Brennan

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