Thank you very much. I don't want to repeat what Paul Szabo said, but I do reflect a lot of what he says. I really agree with him.
Now everyone talks about it being 10 years. Let me tell you something. Before I became a politician in 1989, I was on a national task force to deal with what was then commonly known as FAS/FAE. I was the Canadian Medical Association representative.
On that we had representatives from the alcohol industry, distillers. We also had parents of children who had FAS/FAE. We set out a beautiful plan to have short-, medium-, and long-term goals. It was all nicely done, and one of the goals had to do with labelling. We looked at some of the things that went on in California that were being shown to be very successful in terms of posters in restaurants, posters in liquor outlets, and of course the labelling of alcohol. I know everyone was shocked--and that was about 17 years ago--to find the alcohol industry in Canada labels its bottles to send to the United States but doesn't label its bottles here; that tells you the bottles can be labelled. It's because we lack the will to do this in this country, and given that this is a very preventable cause of what I consider to be human wastage in terms of generations of people who are born with a syndrome that is fully preventable, it really distresses me that 17 years later we are still hearing things like, “It's going to cost too much. Public awareness campaigns are very expensive.”
The cost of the human wastage is very expensive. Nobody has even calculated the lack of productivity of young people with FAS and FAE. Nobody has calculated the cost of people who go to jail who are not really criminals at all, but are actually put into our prisons because of this particular issue. No one has done some of the things we mentioned a long time ago, such as to train corrections officers and police officers to identify the difference between someone who is in fact criminal and someone who has a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. None of that has been done. We have done absolutely no prevention.
Now, I could talk about the fact that $900,000 to CIHR for this issue is a joke. I can talk about the fact that when the committee on the non-medical use of drugs came up with some recommendations, everyone gave a million dollars over two years, which was a joke.
So we have to ask ourselves--and I know it's a provincial issue--two things. Is the federal government under the new national Public Health Agency going to do certain things that the federal government can do within its jurisdiction? Get a database going. Become a clearinghouse for information. And, thirdly, is the federal government going to be able to pull together the best practices of certain provinces and move on it? This is the role of the federal government, a coordinating role and a leadership role in facilitating certain things. That was identified and it has not been done. I want to know if it's going to be done.
I want to know if training of corrections officers and police is going to be done. I want to know if we're going to talk about putting the appropriate amount of money into research. I want to know if we're going to deal with labelling and prevention. This is preventable. We have to prevent it. I want to know if that's going to happen.
Seventeen years later, I am sitting here as a physician. There were brochures in every physician's office. You should know that. In 1988 the British Columbia Medical Association produced brochures with its own dollars, and it was taken up by the local medical associations in every province. The medical associations came and said they were doing it and would Health Canada assist them with the costs of doing this for a longer period of time. Every patient who came into the office picked it up, read about it, talked to the doctor about it.
That was never done. Why not? Now let me have the answers. I'm just fed up.
