For a year and a half, event planner Ethan Gill has regularly donated plasma at a commercial donation centre near his home in Whitby, Ont., that was run by an international pharmaceutical company called Grifols.
Plasma, a golden-coloured, protein-rich fluid found in blood, is used to produce life-saving medicines for patients with conditions such as a compromised immune system.
Mr. Gill often went twice a week as one of the ways he gives back to his community, he said – and getting paid up to $70 each time, which he would not be at a Canadian Blood Services centre, was a perk, too.
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The Grifols plasma centre in Whitby, Ont., was open when The Globe visited this spring to learn about its screening and donation process.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
On a recent afternoon in August, he was hooked up to a plasmapheresis machine as normal, and donated nearly a litre of plasma. It would be the last donation he would make for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Gill had no way to know it at the time, but behind the scenes, Grifols’s head office was dealing with an extraordinary situation.
For months, Health Canada inspectors had been finding deficiencies at Grifols sites across the country.
Health Canada’s attempts to get the company to change its practices were repeatedly unsuccessful – but became increasingly urgent after two donors died in Winnipeg and the company began facing intensifying scrutiny in the media and from the public.
On Wednesday, Aug. 12, Health Canada sent a letter to the company telling it a site in Winnipeg connected to a donor’s death was still not compliant with federal regulations, and with special terms and conditions imposed on the company in March.
The regulator had already threatened that summer that it could take further compliance actions, even up to suspending Grifols’s licence, if the company did not immediately take action.
That same day Grifols did take action: by telling Health Canada it would stop taking collections in the country indefinitely. On Friday, Aug. 14, signs were plastered on the company’s doors across Canada about the indefinite closure.
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Signs at a Grifols donation centre in Regina detail the temporary suspending of operations.Danielle Tocker/The Globe and Mail
Grifols’s closure in August was a dramatic step for the company, the culmination of months of scrutiny on the company’s operations. On Sept. 23, Health Canada went through with a suspension of the licence of the Winnipeg site – the first time the regulator had ever suspended a blood establishment licence.
Grifols gained a major foothold in 2022 as part of a partnership with Canadian Blood Services. The arrangement was controversial from the start, as Grifols pays donors and CBS does not. While the practice is common in the United States, where most of the global supply of plasma is sourced, it is relatively new to Canada – and unwelcome for those Canadians still haunted by the spectre of the tainted blood scandal of the 1980s.
But even more deeply, the partnership touched a nerve with some members of the public, advocates and politicians because it essentially gave a commercial entity – a multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Spain – responsibility for an important piece of Canada’s health infrastructure.
For some donors, the entrance of commercial plasma collection in Canada has provided a badly needed financial lifeline. But it has also exposed questionable practices and urgent questions about the ability of regulators to oversee the kinds of operations that have not existed in Canada until recently.
The Globe and Mail has spoken to dozens of Canadians – donors, patients, doctors and other health-care professionals involved in blood and plasma collection – and revealed the contents of critical Health Canada inspections in a series of stories published over recent months.
The saga has raised important questions about how the public and private sectors can work together to provide and protect a scarce – and life-saving – resource.
The science of plasma had a quantum leap in the world wars of the 20th century, and Canada played a big part in it. Connaught Laboratories in Toronto pioneered the collection of dried serum, used in field hospitals to treat the wounded.
Sanofi Toronto Archives
Canada had to rethink blood donations in the 1980s, when tainted products infected thousands with hepatitis C and HIV. Victims set up these memorials on Parliament Hill in 1998, as part of a campaign for compensation. That year was the debut of Canadian Blood Services, whose work continues today.
Jim Young/Reuters
Part 1: A public promise
The roots of Canada’s present blood system reach back to the 1980s. At that time, the Canadian Red Cross Society collected blood and distributed it to Canadian hospitals – until tens of thousands of patients contracted hepatitis and HIV in a tragedy that came to be known as the tainted blood scandal.
In the 1990s, Justice Horace Krever led an exhaustive commission that recommended a total overhaul of the blood system. He set out five principles to guide the future: blood is a public resource; donors of blood and plasma should not be paid, except in rare circumstances; Canada should be self-sufficient for blood and blood products; Canadians should have free and universal access to blood and blood products; and the safety of the system is paramount.
Federal and provincial governments founded two arm’s-length charities – Canadian Blood Services and Héma-Québec – to run blood and plasma collection outside and inside Quebec, respectively. Both organizations are largely funded by provincial governments.
The charities were given responsibility to not only collect and distribute whole blood, which is commonly used for patients in surgery or those injured in emergencies. They were also given stewardship of – and the obligation to supply – pharmaceutical products used to treat blood disorders, such as hemophilia, and medicines derived from blood – principally from plasma.
This responsibility has grown substantially over time and buying plasma proteins and related drugs now costs CBS more than $1-billion a year – nearly two-thirds of its annual budget.
CBS chief executive officer Graham Sher, who has held the role since 2001, says plasma has become the more challenging and expensive part of the organization. “It has added significantly to the size, scale and complexity of our operations,” he said in an interview Monday.
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Graham Sher has been the head of Canadian Blood Services for 25 years.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
CBS set up a network of centres across the country and built the infrastructure necessary to collect and distribute the whole blood Canadians needed.
But plasma was a different story. Manufacturing drugs like immunoglobulin, a treatment for patients with immune deficiencies, requires pooling large quantities of plasma and reducing it down to a paste through a process called fractionation.
Drug manufacturing has long been the purview of private companies. As CBS collected plasma, it would ship the fluid to manufacturers in the United States or Europe to turn into the pharmaceutical products it would take back.
Dr. Sher has long maintained that the organization is not qualified to run such a manufacturing facility. “That is just not something the not-for-profit sector could do,” he said at a 2026 public board meeting.
These manufacturers often collected their own plasma, too. And they used a different business model: unlike non-profit collectors like CBS, who mounted large advertising campaigns that appealed to donor’s altruism, the for-profit plasma collectors paid donors directly. That was the easiest and ultimately cheapest way, the companies argued, to create a consistent and recurring supply of plasma to make their drugs.
The principal collection site for the global plasma industry has long been the United States. The lion’s share of plasma-derived drugs used around the world comes from plasma collected from paid U.S. donors.
For many years, there was only one plasma centre in Canada that paid donors: a site in Winnipeg started by Cangene corporation in 1984 to collect plasma from donors with a rare antibody, to create a specialized medication for pregnant women with certain medical conditions.
Then in 2009, a small group of entrepreneurs set their sights on bringing a U.S.-style commercial plasma industry to Canada. They set up a company that came to be called Canadian Plasma Resources, with Barzin Bahardoust, who was then a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, in charge.
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Barzin Bahardoust, at top in 2014, was among the founders of Canadian Plasma Resources. It planned to open a clinic on Adelaide Street East in Toronto.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Over the next few years, Mr. Bahardoust and his team at CPR worked on a business plan and scouted locations in Toronto and Hamilton to set up clinics. They met multiple times with Health Canada and Canadian Blood Services to work through regulatory hurdles and explore whether CBS would buy their plasma or products derived from it.
As Health Canada evaluated CPR’s licence applications for two sites in downtown Toronto, the company became the target of public pushback. Public-health proponents – including Canadian Doctors for Medicare, B.C. hemophilia patient advocate Curtis Brandell and writer Kat Lanteigne, who wrote a play about the tainted-blood scandal called Tainted that debuted in the fall of 2013 – protested the centres and got the ear of provincial politicians.
In the spring of 2014, Ontario’s Liberal government introduced a bill that banned paying donors for their blood. Ontario became the second province to ban such a practice, after Quebec which has had a long-standing ban incorporated into its Civil Code.
Ontario’s ban contained an exemption for CBS to pay donors if needed – a clause that would become important years later.
CPR decamped from Ontario and set up a clinic in Saskatchewan in 2016, where the provincial government said they supported paying plasma donors. CPR soon set up another clinic in New Brunswick.
With no domestic manufacturers of plasma-derived products in Canada, CPR worked out an arrangement with German pharmaceutical maker Biotest AG to send them Canadian plasma. Biotest AG hoped to eventually sell the resulting products in Canada, Mr. Bahardoust told Health Canada in 2016, according to an e-mail released under access-to-information law.
Meanwhile, advocates led by Ms. Lanteigne took their lobbying efforts on the road. They convinced lawmakers in British Columbia and Alberta to introduce Ontario-style bans on paying donors. (A federal bill to do the same cleared an initial vote in the Senate, but died at committee.)
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Kat Lanteigne wants more provinces to ban payments for donors.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Throughout all this, CBS remained involved in consultations on the issue. CBS said there was no safety concern with products made from paid donors and its principal concern was whether the physical locations of a paid site would siphon donors away from CBS’s own voluntary locations.
CBS pitched an ambitious plan to the provinces: for $855-million over seven years in additional funding, it would build a network of 40 new plasma collection sites across the country that would get Canada up to 50 per cent self-sufficiency in plasma collection.
The provinces balked at the price tag, but supported a scaled-down plan in which CBS would open three new centres dedicated to collecting plasma.
Dr. Sher, in a Feb. 7, 2018, letter to federal, provincial and territorial health ministers, said giving commercial, for-profit entities control of plasma supply creates a risk for Canadian patients because those companies could redirect the plasma elsewhere, such as when a contract term ended.
“This has happened in the recent past in the U.S., with the vertical integration approach of large pharmaceutical companies. Grifols, for example, recently purchased 23 plasma centres and intends to redirect the supply of plasma from those centres into its own supply chain.”
At the time of the letter, the public system’s control of plasma seemed assured. But Grifols would soon be part of the picture, too.
Part 2: Enter Grifols
Grifols, founded in Barcelona in 1909, is one of a handful of global companies that dominate the market for plasma-derived drugs.
Grifols differs from its chief rivals in its focus on creating local networks. In 2020, it launched a public-private partnership with Egypt’s government. Since then, Grifols has built out 16 collection sites in the country. The company says the project has already made Egypt self-sufficient for its plasma needs, with plans to send excess supply to other countries.
Then Grifols set its sights on Canada. With Canada’s high per-capita consumption of plasma drugs, the country was already a major customer.
The use of these drugs has risen sharply over time, sometimes as much as 10 per cent per year. Only some of those drugs are made from plasma sourced by Canadians. CBS uses a measure called “self-sufficiency,” which compares how much of the drugs consumed by Canadians are made from Canadian plasma. That number stood at around 30 per cent before 2010, dipped into the teens as demand grew faster than collections, and now stands back at 34 per cent as of last year. CBS aims to get that number to 50 per cent. Experts, including the Ontario Auditor-General, have suggested unenforced guidelines and poor data collection have contributed to Canada’s high use.
Grifols’s first step was to acquire a partly built factory in Montreal in 2020. The facility, first started by South Korean company Green Cross Biotherapeutics in 2015, was meant to be Canada’s first production site for immunoglobulin. And while Green Cross had signed a deal with Héma-Québec and was in talks with CBS to supply both with immunoglobulin, the company struggled to complete construction on the site. In fact, even after Grifols bought it, the site remains under construction; it finally began to produce one type of drug called albumin in 2025, but immunoglobulin – what Grifols said is meant to be the main product made at the plant – is not expected to be produced there until sometime in 2027 at the earliest.
By early 2022, Grifols acquired the plasma collection site in Winnipeg once operated by Cangene, which was then being run by a company called Prometic Plasma Resources Inc. Grifols also bought Biotest AG, the German company that had been receiving plasma from Canadian Plasma Resources.
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Grifols bought this facility in Winnipeg about four years ago.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic was raging and causing supply chain disruptions across industries. Canada’s heavy reliance on foreign-produced immunoglobulin raised fear of product shortages. Alberta MPs used that as reason to repeal the province’s ban on donors, and CPR soon set up clinics in three of the province’s cities.
CBS began multiple initiatives. It compiled a risk analysis that evaluated different options to boost plasma collection, which endorsed working with the private sector.
Meanwhile, CBS held a “competitive dialogue” with plasma collectors to see who would make the best commercial partner. CBS received only a handful of bids and went through serious negotiations only with Grifols, which by then already had the makings of the only immunoglobulin factory in Canada and a collection site, and had offered CBS advice on building its own plasma collection centres.
What CBS “recognized at the time of the pandemic is that no matter how much modeling we did, we in our non-remunerated model could not expand collections sufficiently in Canada to achieve what we needed,” Mr. Sher said in an interview.
On Sept. 7, 2022, CBS announced both the report and a contract with Grifols as a fait accompli. CBS said the terms of the contract addressed its prior concerns because it was for a long term (15 years) and gave CBS the ability to veto Grifols’s locations, to allay concerns that the paid clinics would siphon donors from unpaid ones. The deal meant CBS was blessing Grifols as its “agent” so it could operate in provinces that banned paid-plasma collection.
Dr. Sher said at the announcement that the contract also guaranteed that all the plasma that Grifols collected in Canada was to be used exclusively for Canadian patients.
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When Canadian Blood Services made a deal with Grifols in 2022, the agency said their earlier concerns about the Barcelona-based company had been addressed.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Some patient groups, including Immunity Canada and the Network of Rare Blood Disorder Organizations, hailed the deal and said working with the commercial sector was an important way to secure future supplies of plasma-derived drugs.
The deal once again faced some public pushback from public-health advocates and unions, such as the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions. B.C. declined to give Grifols its blessing to operate in the province and the city councils of Toronto and Hamilton passed symbolic motions telling the company it was not wanted there.
But this time the door to paid plasma was being opened by CBS, dampening opposition.
Ontario initially dragged its feet on giving Grifols its approval to operate, but eventually agreed. The outcry died down – even Ms. Lanteigne dissolved her organization BloodWatch, which had been among the fiercest critics, and retired from advocacy for personal reasons. CPR eventually agreed in the summer of 2023 to be bought by Grifols.
The Spanish company was now the owner of essentially all of Canada’s private plasma infrastructure and set up to be a major partner and supplier for CBS for years to come.
Grifols even attracted interest from Brookfield Asset Management, Canada’s largest investor. Brookfield’s private equity arm and the Grifols family announced in July of 2024 they were exploring a joint bid for ownership of the company. The $9.5-billion deal later fell apart over a disagreement over how much the company was worth.
By early 2025, Grifols was ready to open five centres in Ontario. Other than CPR’s short-lived experiment in downtown Toronto a decade earlier, these centres were the first real commercial plasma collection sites that Canada’s largest province had ever seen.
When the Grifols centre in Whitby was still taking new appointments, visitors could find a list of paid incentives for referring their friends to donate.
Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
Part 3: Rising concerns
By the summer of 2025, trouble was brewing behind the scenes.
On July 9, a 43-year-old aircraft maintenance technician filed a lawsuit alleging he had suffered an “acute kidney injury” and went to hospital after a donation at the Taylor Avenue site in Winnipeg two years earlier. The donor said he received an e-mail from the company warning that broken red blood cells had been reinserted into his body during the donation because of a “machine error.” He said he felt fatigued for months after and was at risk of long-term complications. (Grifols said in a statement of defence that donors are made aware of the risk of the donation procedure. The case has not yet been heard in court.)
Then a Globe and Mail story in August called into question the assurances made by Grifols and CBS that all the plasma collected by Grifols in Canada would be used for Canadian patients. The story revealed Grifols’s Montreal plant had begun producing a medicine called albumin, derived from Canadian-donated plasma, that was being exported to foreign markets. CBS said it was fine with the arrangement because Canada already had all the albumin it needed. Conservative members of Parliament on the health committee called for an investigation into the issue – and while the body never did a full study, the committee would ultimately summon a Grifols executive the following year.
In the meantime, in October came the tragedy that would eventually lead the company into its greatest crisis in Canada.
Rodiyat Alabede was a 22-year-old university student in Winnipeg who had come from Nigeria and dreamed of being a social worker. She was drawn to donate at Grifols because she needed money to fix her car.
After screening, Ms. Alabede began her donation at 4:15 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 25, according to documents her family later obtained from Health Canada. Over the next 45 minutes, the donation machine displayed five alerts, at least one of which should have caused a staff member to terminate the procedure, a Health Canada inspection later showed.
At 5:01 p.m., Ms. Alabede began to convulse. Grifols staff ended the donation and attempted to revive her, but were unable to reliably find a pulse. They called emergency services, who continued resuscitation attempts. She arrived at a hospital at 6 p.m., and shortly after was pronounced dead.
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Rodiyat Alabede went into convulsions while donating blood in Winnipeg, and died shortly after in hospital.Courtesy of family
On Monday, Grifols informed Health Canada of the death. Operators of blood collection centres are required by federal regulation to report to Health Canada within 24 hours if there has been a death during or within 72 hours of a plasma donation.
On Nov. 10, the company filed an investigation report to Health Canada. The report detailed Ms. Alabede’s donation, the alerts and staff’s attempts to revive her, and concluded that “all procedures were followed appropriately, that equipment was functioning properly and that supplies used were suitable for use.”
Health Canada inspectors visited the site for the first time on Nov. 20 to interview Grifols staff and inspect records. Two weeks later, on Dec. 5, Health Canada issued the company a letter saying that, in fact, staff were not following procedures correctly. The regulator instructed Grifols to immediately instruct staff to follow the donation machine’s manual in responding to the sort of alert that displayed during Ms. Alabede’s donation. Health Canada followed up with a second letter on Dec. 22 that had a fuller accounting of deficiencies, including inadequate staff training and high staff turnover.
The second letter noted that inspectors had noticed a pattern in the company’s operations. Since 2022, the letter said, multiple inspections had turned up problems and, inspectors believed, Grifols’s attempts to address the deficiencies were inadequate.
In fact, around the same time as it examined the Winnipeg site, Health Canada was inspecting two other sites in Calgary and Regina – ultimately issuing both a “non-compliant” rating in whether they followed federal blood regulations. For example, inspectors in Regina found “multiple” donors were allowed to donate with bruising and punctures on their arms, without proper medical assessments.
The mounting issues were so prevalent that Health Canada started an inspection of Grifols’s head office in January to examine its national policies and records. This inspection, with interviews and record examinations, was held virtually, because the address listed as Grifols’s head office in Oakville, Ont., was in a co-working space.
Neither Grifols nor Health Canada made public announcements of the death through the fall or winter.
Then in January, a second person died, at Grifols’s other centre in Winnipeg, on Innovation Drive. Less is publicly known about this death because the individual’s family has chosen to remain private. But according to documents obtained by The Globe, the donor visited the Innovation Drive site on Jan. 29. They began experiencing unspecified symptoms by early the next morning, when they were taken to hospital and died. Their cause of death is described as complications arising from a heart attack.
Grifols reported the death to Health Canada on Feb. 3, and inspectors visited the site on Feb. 9 and 10.
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The deaths in Winnipeg set off red flags at Health Canada, which co-ordinated with provincial health ministries to identify other risks.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Internally, some at Health Canada began to sound the alarm. Christine Leckie, a director-general of the medical devices and clinical compliance directorate, reached out to other senior bureaucrats in the health ministries of Manitoba and Nova Scotia with an urgent request to meet, according to records obtained through access-to-information. Worried there was a “recurring issue” affecting plasma donations, Ms. Leckie wrote in an e-mail that their teams had to work together to “mitigate any immediate health risks.”
Bureaucrats in more provinces, along with CBS, were brought into the discussion and they prepared for a meeting in March. During these preliminary talks, Ontario officials questioned Health Canada on why three of the province’s five Grifols sites had never been inspected – something the regulator promised to do weeks later after the concerns were aired in a Globe and Mail story. (Only one of the sites had been inspected as of late September, according to a federal database.)
By happenstance, on March 10, the MPs on the health committee who had voiced concern the previous summer voted to summon Grifols to testify during a series of hearings on pharmaceutical sovereignty. Conservative MP Matt Strauss noted Grifols had turned down an earlier invitation to appear, but he pressed his colleagues to take the unusual step of requesting the company’s presence so it could explain why some of its products from Montreal were being sold overseas. The testimony was set for two weeks later.
Then the following day, news of the deaths broke. CBC and Globe and Mail reporters had been chasing tips that two Winnipeg donors had died and on March 11, the news outlets began reporting on the deaths. The accounts of what happened to Ms. Alabede relied on her friends, who had gone to the hospital to identify her body after she passed. Health Canada and Grifols confirmed the deaths, but provided few other details.
On March 25, Grifols filed its final investigation report on Ms. Alabede’s death with Health Canada. The report was substantially similar to the one the company had filed in November, but now contained a copy of a report from Manitoba’s chief medical examiner. The short report included the results of the autopsy in October and declared her cause of death as “sudden cardiac death” linked to “dilated cardiomegaly,” a medical term for an enlarged heart. Ms. Alabede’s family believes she was unaware she had an underlying heart condition.
On March 26, Grifols’s Canadian vice-president of sales and operations, Mary Hughes, testified at the House of Commons health committee. In an unusual move, she was flanked by a lawyer.
Ms. Hughes declined to discuss details of the deaths, the company’s investigations into them or the broader agreement with CBS. Instead, she repeatedly insisted: “Today there is no correlation between death and plasma collection.”
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Grifols denied that the deaths in Winnipeg were caused by the donation process.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
The next day, March 27, an unspecified Health Canada staff member wrote an internal medical summary of Ms. Alabede’s case. The staff member based their summary entirely on Grifols’s report and the attached document from the medical examiner. The summary said Ms. Alabede’s death was “temporally coincident” with the plasma donation but not caused by it. The autopsy noted Ms. Alabede’s cardiac problems began while she was donating, but did not say the activity did or did not contribute to her death.
The medical summary also said all standard operating procedures were followed – language that echoed the Grifols report, but was at odds with the investigation from Health Canada inspectors, which found procedures were not followed properly. Health Canada has never explained the discrepancy and has since qualified its comments about the medical summary by saying it is not the department’s role to determine a cause of death.
The following Monday, March 30, Health Canada imposed terms and conditions on Grifols’s licence, which covered 16 of the company’s 17 locations. (The Winnipeg site on Innovation Drive was on a separate licence.) The regulator said the move was necessary because of deficiencies uncovered during its virtual inspection of the company’s head office. Those deficiencies included donors not being screened properly and staffing not being appropriate, such as physicians or physician substitutes not always being present.
The terms and conditions included a number of measures that directed the company to put limits on the number of donors seen at one time and to improve staff training. Health Canada announced the license terms publicly two days later.
And then on April 3, Good Friday, Health Canada communications staff sent out an e-mail to reporters: The regulator had determined there was “no linkage” between the deaths of the two donors in Winnipeg and the plasma donation process. Health Canada said its assessments of the death was “now complete.”
Then starting in May, The Globe began publishing a series of stories based on inspection reports it obtained that, for the first time, revealed the depth of Health Canada’s concerns. The stories revealed that Ms. Alabede’s health problems began in the middle of the donation (something that had not been clear publicly until then), that multiple alerts sounded during her procedure and that the head-office inspection had revealed serious problems with donor screening and staff attendance.
Some of those documents had been obtained by Ms. Alabede’s family, who had made numerous requests to provincial and federal authorities under privacy legislation for documents about the young woman. By this time the family had begun working with Ms. Lanteigne, who came out of her advocacy retirement to help the family navigate bureaucracy and speak on their behalf in public.
Grifols has said it accepts the findings of authorities such as Health Canada, and pointed to the regulator’s statement about “no linkage” between the deaths and the donation process.
Ms. Lanteigne said the family believes the efforts to investigate Ms. Alabede’s death have been insufficient. She suggested a public hearing at a parliamentary committee would help. “The total blackout of accountability and action to correct Ms. Alabede’s record of death by all parties involved must be corrected,” she said.
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Ms. Lanteigne feels a public hearing before MPs would help Ms. Alabede’s family find answers.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Throughout the spring, CBS remained relatively quiet about the controversy. Dr. Sher suggested at an open CBS board meeting on June 18 that the problems weren’t critical if Health Canada allowed Grifols sites to remain open.
“Yes, it is true that Health Canada found a number of non-compliances in a number of the Grifols sites, but they were still licensed to operate, and Grifols is committed to addressing the deficiencies that were found by Health Canada,” Dr. Sher said.
That state of affairs wouldn’t last much longer. The following week, on June 23, Health Canada inspectors made a surprise visit to the Taylor Avenue location in Winnipeg. They yet again found problems with donor screening and standard procedures not being followed, among other concerns, and said the company was not abiding by the conditions that had been imposed. Health Canada warned of further consequences that could include suspending operations.
Unsatisfied with the company’s responses, Health Canada issued a notice of non-compliance for the Taylor Avenue location on August 12 and proposed a licence suspension for the following day. Instead, Grifols informed Health Canada it would temporarily close collections at all its centres.
The next day, Grifols announced the pause publicly. The company said it had faced “unfounded attention” and was taking the step “proactively” to improve its operations in co-ordination with Health Canada and CBS.
On Sept. 23, Health Canada suspended the licence for Grifols’s Taylor Avenue location, the first time the regulator had ever taken such a step.
Epilogue
Grifols’s deal with CBS called for the company to collect 600,000 litres of plasma per year. Grifols had reached about 400,000 litres in 2025 and was in the midst of ramping up collections to meet its contractual target when it shut down abruptly in mid-August, further complicating its efforts to meet this year’s target. The company said it hoped to finish work on the part of the Montreal plant that produces immunoglobulin in 2027, after which it would be subject to Health Canada inspection.
Grifols used the pause to shuffle some of its Canadian leaders and impose more control from the Barcelona headquarters. Mr. Bahardoust, co-founder of Canadian Plasma Resources, had played a key role in directing Grifols’s collections in Canada since his company had been acquired. Grifols bought out his remaining shares in the Canadian operation and, as of Sept. 1, Mr. Bahardoust no longer had a role in the organization.
The company has also revised the number of the serious adverse reactions – incidents involving donors suffering serious injury or death – that it and its predecessor companies reported to Health Canada. Grifols said in August that only six incidents that meet that criteria have occurred since 2018 instead of the 25 originally reported to Health Canada. The regulator has said it accepts the revised reports. CBS, by contrast, has reported zero serious adverse reactions at their own facilities in that time, and there are no records of CBS sites ever being found non-compliant by Health Canada.
What other steps the company is taking to improve its safety standards, or when it plans to reopen, so far remain undisclosed. Grifols said by e-mail on Tuesday that it remains committed to Canada and has invested $1-billion in its operations in the country.
CBS said in August that Grifols’s pause will not affect the availability of plasma-derived drugs in Canada because the organization has sufficient inventory and arrangements with suppliers. CBS continues to collect blood and plasma from donors and to work with multiple international pharmaceutical companies to buy medicine for Canadian patients.
In the blood: More from The Globe and Mail
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The Grifols story, in depth
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Editorial: The deaths of two plasma donors need scrutiny – from Parliament