Canada’s Health Committee plans to review the controversial appointment of a Pfizer exec to the board of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the government agency that oversees health research in Canada, The Tyee reports.

Bernard Prigent, Pfizer Canada’s medical director, was appointed last month to the CIHR’s governing council (see here). Last month, CIHR president Alain Beaudet said that he hopes to create closer ties with industry to ensure involvemetn and investment, but the move has stirred concerns since the organization is responsible for allocating research funding across the country, the paper writes.

“There’s no place in our scientific organizations like CIHR for a drug company official,” NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis, tells The Tyee. “It’s shocking that this government appointed the vice president of the biggest brand name drug company in the world, to the board of the CIHR which is supposed to be a body of independents and scientific endeavors free from any ties to industry at all.”

This is actually the second flap this week in Canada involving Pfizer in some way. The same person who led a controversial review that provided controversial advice on British Columbia’s pharmaceutical policies has a new position advising the drugmaker, The Tyee notes.

Don Avison was recently appointed as the Canadian representative on Pfizer Global’s International Advisory Board, according to The Tyee. Two years ago, the BC government appointed Avison as the chair of a pharmaceutical task force that advised the health ministry (back story).

The panel’s report, released last year, suggested cutting the amount paid for generics and getting rid of the University of British Columbia’s Therapeutics Initiative, a group of researchers who provide independent evidence-based advice about prescription drugs.

“Is this international advisory position payback for what he delivered in the task force report? Because that’s what it looks like,” health policy researcher Alan Cassels tells The Tyee. Avison didn’t respond to the paper’s request for comment.

But British Columbia Health Minister Kevin Falcon isn’t perturbed. “If someone’s speculating that as a result of the task force he’s now taken a position that he’s going to receive a personal benefit out of as a result of work he did, I don’t think that would be fair based on my assessment of Don and his many years of public service,” he tells The Tyee. “He did a good job, very good job in fact, as chair of the pharmaceutical task force. The fact he’s now been asked to sit on an international advisory board, I don’t have any discomfort with that.”