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Conservative MLA Was Let Go from Psychedelic Therapy Company

Donald Gauvreau says he hired Jody Toor believing she had an MD.

Michelle Gamage 30 Jan 2025The Tyee

Michelle Gamage is The Tyee’s health reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.

Before she was elected as the MLA for Langley-Willowbrook last fall, Jody Toor misrepresented her medical credentials to get a job as chief medical officer for a local company that offered “psychedelic therapy” for people struggling with mental health.

In a piece published yesterday, The Tyee did a deep dive into Toor’s medical and academic credentials and found no record that she had earned an MD degree. An expert in medical misinformation The Tyee spoke with further characterized the non-accredited university where Toor got her PhD as a “diploma mill."

Toor’s LinkedIn profile says she worked as chief medical officer for Conscious Mind Labs from January 2021 to February 2022.

Conscious Mind Labs Inc. offers ketamine assisted psychotherapy, psilocybin and MDMA assisted therapy, clinical counselling, naturopathic medicine and registered massage therapy at its Vancouver clinic, Conscious Mind Clinic.

Company founder and co-owner Donald Gauvreau says his clinic contracts prescribers to provide psilocybin or MDMA treatments for eligible patients through Health Canada’s Special Access Program.

When The Tyee checked this with Health Canada, a spokesperson said Health Canada does not disclose which practitioners have been approved to access psilocybin or MDMA through its Special Access Program, or SAP. Individual health-care providers make requests to SAP on behalf of their patients, and withholding this information protects patient confidentiality, they said.

However, the spokesperson did say that all health-care practitioners can prescribe the intranasal spray Spravato, which contains ketamine, for treatment-resistant depression, and that no health-care practitioner accessing SAP has listed Conscious Mind Clinic on its application.

Health Canada did confirm that it had granted approval for Conscious Mind to run a clinical trial looking into how psilocybin can be used in group therapy.

The Tyee asked Jody Toor and the BC Conservatives to speak with her to clarify her credentials and respond to her former boss’s allegations, but neither responded.

The Tyee spoke with Gauvreau via email after he declined a phone interview.

Gauvreau said he met Toor a year before he launched his business. At the time, Toor had a “beautiful” wellness clinic in White Rock called Empress Health and Wellness, and Gauvreau said “it appeared as though she knew what she was doing.”

“I believed and understood that she graduated from medical school and held that degree,” he said. He said he couldn’t recall the name of the school but that he thought it was an “international school in the Caribbean.”

He said he was also told Toor had completed a research fellowship at the University of Miami after finishing medical school and met one of her colleagues from the school.

“I saw hard copies of various degrees and certifications on display at her Empress Health clinic office and believed they were real,” he said.

And so when Gauvreau started his business, he reached out and asked Toor for her help to build his clinic.

A photo of 'Dr. Jody Toor' appears on the far right, alongside three other Conscious Mind Labs employees. She is listed as chief medical officer and the credentials under her name include MD, IMD and PhD.
A screenshot from Conscious Mind Labs’ website from 2022, showing Jody Toor working as chief medical officer and representing herself as an MD.

“Jody represented herself as an integrative medicine doctor” who was certified to work in the United States, Gauvreau said. He added he understood she was not licensed as a medical doctor in Canada and said that her job was to oversee the clinic “from a business standpoint only.”

Integrative medicine is “mostly the incorporation of what amounts to quackery into proper medicine,” said Joe Schwarcz, director of the McGill University Office for Science and Society and professor of chemistry, who works to address medical misinformation.

When integrative medicine is practised by a doctor, it can mean incorporating holistic wellness elements such as yoga, reiki or acupuncture into a health-care regime. When it is practised by someone who is not a doctor, it amounts to plain quackery, Schwarcz said.

During Toor’s employment at Conscious Mind Labs, the company put out press releases identifying Toor as an MD and a board-certified integrative medicine doctor. The company website also identified Toor as having a PhD.

A woman with medium skin tone and dark brown hair smiles at the camera while wearing a white lab coat with professional credentials embroidered on it in black thread.
In July 2021 Toor shared a picture of herself wearing a white lab coat with ‘Dr. Jody Toor, MD, IMD, PhD, chief medical officer, Conscious Mind Labs’ embroidered on it. Image via Toor’s Instagram account integrative_medical_wellness.

In its investigation into Toor’s credentials, The Tyee could not find any evidence that Toor graduated from an accredited medical school, completed a medical residency or was qualified to practise medicine. Toor is not registered with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC, a requirement to practise medicine in the province.

Toor’s double PhD comes from a non-accredited school that grants its degrees to people in as little as a year.

“In regards to the use of her credentials on our old website, honestly, at the time I did not know that she was not allowed to use these credentials in jurisdictions that was she was not licensed/practising in and I thought we could use the credentials as she presented them to me from a business standpoint,” Gauvreau said.

Gauvreau added that Toor was terminated in the first half of 2022 “because she wasn’t able to execute on building out the clinic model and bring in the appropriate professionals needed for this.”

He said he has had no connection to Toor since spring 2022.

Gauvreau said the company’s Conscious Mind Labs website was “hijacked” by a former business associate around the same time, in spring 2022.

The “hijacked” website was live and listed Toor as the company’s chief medical officer, noting her MD, IMD and PhD, until mid-November 2024, weeks after the provincial election took place.

Gauvreau said he has been working to have the site taken down and has even gotten the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC to write a letter to the hosting site saying Toor was not a doctor and should not be represented as one.

“This letter helped us get the website suspended by a previous hosting provider,” he said.

The website is down again, as of earlier this week.

But it did resurface for a time. The resurfaced version of the website replaced Toor’s and Gauvreau’s profile pictures with a Pinocchio and a clown, respectively, and blacked out large swaths of text. Clicking on the “our clinics” tab led to a federal government website for reporting fraud.*

Ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA are controlled substances in Canada.

But researchers have been working to show the drugs also have therapeutic uses. For example, psilocybin can be used to treat severe depression, and a ketamine derivative can help with treatment-resistant depression. Doctors can prescribe this ketamine derivative in Canada. MDMA-assisted psychotherapy has been shown to be potentially helpful in reducing social anxiety in autistic adults.

Toor’s stance on drugs

After joining the BC Conservatives Toor would occasionally share the party’s anti-drug posts on her social media, condemning public drug use, critiquing policies designed to reduce overdoses in public washrooms, calling for involuntary care and attending talks about drugs given by Adam Zivo, a National Post columnist who shares reactionary views on safer supply that have been characterized by academics as contributing to a “moral panic,” due in part to their overreliance on anecdotes and anonymous sources.

Longtime drug reform activist Dana Larsen says he was surprised to learn a Conservative MLA had worked with a company involved in psychedelics, considering the strong anti-drug stance held by other politicians in the party.

Larsen openly sells unregulated cannabis and psychedelics at several storefronts in Vancouver and uses the profits to run free drug-checking services at several locations in Vancouver. Larsen wants the federal government to legalize magic mushrooms the same way it legalized cannabis.

Larsen’s business and advocacy have been heavily criticized by B.C. Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko and party leader John Rustad.

Larsen’s mushroom stores have been raided by the Vancouver police twice, but he has not yet been charged.

After the first raid, Larsen sent a package containing one gram of magic mushrooms and one coca leaf to every MLA, calling on them to reconsider drug policy.

At the time, Rustad told CBC that “hard drugs” “kill people, ruin lives, and destroy our communities,” and Sturko told CityNews, “At this time these are controlled substances and this type of activity is wrong.”

To have someone like Toor working with psilocybin and then being allowed to be a member of the Conservatives “sounds like hypocrisy,” Larsen said.

“For the Conservative party to be, on the one hand, attacking dispensaries like mine, attacking mushrooms and psychedelics and being very anti-drug, but also having people in their inner circle who are lying about their credentials, maybe to get permits and to advance their careers and stuff? It seems like hypocrisy within the party and I’m not surprised about that.”

He also expressed frustration with dishonest people overshadowing the hard work being done by drug policy activists and researchers.

“This kind of industry is rife with scammers and people wanting to take advantage and get in early so they can profit when changes happen to the [drug policy] law,” he said.

* Story updated on Jan. 30 at 10:38 a.m. to note that the Conscious Minds website has again been suspended.  [Tyee]

Read more: Health, BC Politics

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