The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is partnering with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to create a continuing education program for doctors.

Under the new initiative, Pfizer will provide C$780,000 (US$740,000) to create an online training program aimed at helping Canadian physicians hone their skills and to keep them abreast of the latest developments in medicine. An administrative board responsible for overseeing the program will include two Pfizer employees along with two staff members from the medical association and two external individuals.

The collaboration has hit a sore note for many critics who worry about physicians cozying up with the profit-making entity. “My feeling is that the pharmaceutical industry has no business at all educating doctors,” Arnold Relman, a retired physician at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, told the Globe and Mail. “There’s no question that if you’re paying the piper, you influence the tune that the piper is going to play.”

But Sam Shortt, the CMA’s director of knowledge transfer, defended the partnership. “There’s no connection between the funder and the people who are actually providing the content” of the education program, he said.

Last year, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Paul Hébert of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, argued in an editorial that industry-funded physician-education programs were “unacceptable” and “in dire need of a major overhaul.”

For more on how the close relationship between pharma and the medical profession might be shaping health priorities, see Nature Medicine‘s conversation with Ray Moynihan, co-author of book Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients.