Health Canada has found such serious violations at two dozen drug facilities that it declared the companies — makers of everything from cancer treatments and radioactive compounds to over-the-counter medications — “non-compliant” with the law.

The regulator quietly released the results of its inspections since 2013 after a recent Toronto Star investigation revealed troubling problems at Canadian drug facilities using records provided not by Health Canada but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Previously, inspection results were kept secret.

Nearly one-third of all Canadian drug plants inspected since 2013 have terms and conditions on their licences. In many of these cases, the government imposed conditions to ensure the health and safety of consumers after inspectors flagged problems.

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Health Canada said it released the inspection information as part of its “ongoing commitment to openness and transparency.”

The information “is the first step in a phased approach to make more information available to Canadians regarding good-manufacturing-practice inspections of Canadian facilities,” a government spokesman said in an email.

A recent Star investigation found that Canadian drug companies knowingly distributed defective products. The Star had to rely on inspection records provided by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which inspects Canadian facilities that export drugs south of the border.

After the Star’s articles in September, Health Minister Rona Ambrose came under fire on Parliament Hill and the health regulator was criticized as “feeble, inadequate and incompetent.”

Politicians and drug safety experts were angry that the public had to learn about problems at Canadian drug companies from U.S. government inspection records.

The newly released information shows 24 Canadian companies have been found non-compliant since January 2013, prompting Health Canada to enforce corrective measures or temporarily suspend their licences.

A February 2014 inspection found concerning problems with Contract Pharmaceuticals Ltd.’s laboratory in Markham, where the company tests the compounds it uses to make drug products.

“At no time was the safety of our products compromised, but rather this was about the procedures we were using for recording data,” Ken Paige, the company’s CEO, said in an email. “Nonetheless this was a serious issue for us.”

Paige said the company changed its procedures and reviewed all the affected data. Health Canada reinspected the lab in April and found it compliant, he said.

At Halifax’s Capital District Health Authority, the diagnostic imaging unit never got its licence to manufacture a radioactive compound it uses in PET-CT scans.

The hospital network renovated its facilities so it could produce the compound on-site in late 2010. However, the specialized facility failed to meet the “evolving standard” of good manufacturing practice, said Susan Delaney, director of diagnostic imaging.

She said almost all the issues have been fixed and the health authority hopes to reapply for a manufacturing licence by year’s end.

Despite the non-compliant rating, the facility continues to produce and use the compound. Delaney said Health Canada has approved the health authority’s radioactive substance as a drug product and it can be used so long as patients agree to its use as part of a clinical trial.

“I think (Health Canada is) comfortable that the product we’re using is safe,” Delaney said.

Some companies who have been stamped as non-compliant say the regulator was overly aggressive in suspending the firms’ licences over documentation problems they claimed didn’t impact the drugs’ quality.

“I decided to bite the bullet and do what Health Canada wanted us to do,” said Michael Canan, whose Quebec-based Laboratoires Sterigen had its licence suspended after a January 2013 inspection.

The company, which manufactures sterile drug products, brought in outside specialists to fix its “documentation problem,” Canan said. A followup inspection in 2014 deemed the plant compliant.

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At least one of the companies found to be non-compliant — Biolyse Pharma, an Ontario manufacturer of a cancer treatment — now has to provide Health Canada with monthly progress reports as part of the conditions of its licence after a re-inspection found the facility compliant.

Health Canada called the terms and conditions “a regulatory tool to help ensure the health and safety of the consumer and to continue to monitor closely the commitments made to Health Canada.”

Toronto-based Apotex, a generic drug manufacturer with facilities in the GTA and India, had eight of its domestic facilities inspected by Health Canada since the beginning of 2013. The new data shows that four of those inspected sites have conditions imposed by the regulator.

At the firm’s Richmond Hill facility on Elgin Mills Rd. E., inspected in November 2013, Health Canada requires Apotex to inform the regulator within three business days of any “sterility failure” of a finished drug product batch.

Each of the four sites with conditions on their licences received compliant ratings following recent inspections.

Health Canada may find problems at a facility and still issue a compliant rating.

Questions about these inspections, sent by the Star last week to an Apotex spokesperson, went unanswered.

For months, the Star has been asking Health Canada for more information on its inspection program, including detailed reports that go beyond what has now been made public. In July, under access to information legislation, the Star requested full inspection records of all companies that received non-compliant ratings.

At the time, Health Canada said the release of these reports could only come after consultation with third parties, typically drug companies. To date, the regulator has still not released this information.

With these new disclosures, Health Canada is now giving the public some of the same information that the FDA has already been providing.

Using such FDA records, the Star, in September, published its investigation showing the American regulator has a stricter enforcement regime.

The Star articles also showed Canadian companies hid, altered and in some cases destroyed test data that showed their products were tainted or potentially unsafe. Other companies did not report evidence of side-effects suffered by consumers taking their drugs.

There are limitations to Health Canada’s new transparency initiative. While the disclosures show the date and location of the inspection, and whether the inspection led to regulatory action, Health Canada has not yet released details of the problems it found in all but one case.

And while the new data shows that 13 facilities received a non-compliant rating and no longer have a licence, Health Canada refused to say whether in these cases it revoked the licence or the company voluntarily shut down post-inspection.