Evidence of meeting #41 for Health in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was injuries.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:35 p.m.
NDP
Megan Leslie NDP Halifax, NS
Do you have statistics on the direct costs to the health care system resulting from things like emergency room visits and hospitalization because of injuries?
12:35 p.m.
Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Planning and Public Health Integration Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada
We have the report I referred to that calculated the costs at almost $20 billion per year. We can provide that to you.
12:35 p.m.
NDP
12:35 p.m.
Director General, Centre for Health Promotion, Public Health Agency of Canada
I'm not sure. As for the actual breakdown within the report, we'll have to look it up. It's been a while since I've looked at it.
12:35 p.m.
NDP
Megan Leslie NDP Halifax, NS
I'd love a copy of that. Thanks.
Yesterday, Health Canada introduced new restrictions on the amount of lead in products, but there wasn't any mention of enforcement. There was no mention of more resources for monitoring, for enforcing these new regulations. I'm wondering how the government will ensure that these regulations are being enforced.
12:35 p.m.
Director General, Consumer Product Safety Directorate, Department of Health
The new regulations become part of the body of regulations that we enforce on a cyclical basis. We are currently in the process of doubling the number of our inspectors. It's an area to which government has allocated some resources. We do cyclical enforcement through a process of intelligence gathering, and we review our regulations periodically.
Part of the intelligence is to assess where we expect to find non-compliance. That's what we're going for. Sometimes we have to explain why we have found a high level of non-compliance. It's because that's what we're looking for, and that's the basis of our cyclical enforcement efforts. So these regulations become part of the cyclical enforcement plan, and we continue to do a lot of outreach to industry. We expect them to comply with the regulations. We'll make sure that industry is aware of them. I think to a large extent they already are.
We will also inform consumers. There are thousands of retail outlets in Canada, and we can't have an inspector at every retail outlet. We try to make sure that consumers are equipped with the information they need. When they see something suspicious, we want them to ask questions and let us know. It's important intelligence for us.
12:40 p.m.
NDP
Megan Leslie NDP Halifax, NS
This was a good announcement. But I imagine it will greatly increase the amount of work that you folks are doing. We read reports about lead in baby bottle nipples, and in places that I wouldn't think to look for lead. So I would expect this to put extra pressure on you guys. Do you think it'll be okay with just the cyclical system?
12:40 p.m.
Director General, Consumer Product Safety Directorate, Department of Health
As well as the follow-up on complaints, yes, because we don't send our inspectors out only to look at compliance with one regulation. It's not that now we have these two new lead regulations we'll have to add a layer of enforcement.
Our inspectors are schooled in the full body of the regulations. So if, for example, they're visiting a particular retail outlet where there might be a range of consumer products, and there often are, our inspectors are on the alert for all possible non-compliance. They'll look at products to see what the surface coding is. They will also be looking at toy regulations: are there small parts that are in non-compliance?
I did an inspection myself with officers in Edmonton. We went into a liquidation warehouse type of place and they looked at everything. We went through every row. I found the non-compliance. I was very proud of myself.
12:40 p.m.
Director General, Consumer Product Safety Directorate, Department of Health
Small parts.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, witnesses.
I'm going to start with an observation. When I was playing hockey as a youngster, there was an awareness of hitting from behind, but not as much. Now, a lot of the younger players have a stop sign on the back of their jerseys and it's a continuous reminder to not hit from behind, because there are obviously serious injuries that can happen.
What does it take to go from general awareness and good sportsmanship to something like that, and possibly the next step of stopping that? There are hundreds of leagues across Canada and different organizations to deal with. Not all of them are under the same body. How do you deal with something like that?
November 30th, 2010 / 12:40 p.m.
Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Planning and Public Health Integration Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada
We deal with something like that in a number of ways. First of all, it's gathering the information that there is serious injury from that type of activity in a sport, gathering that information from a number of different sources, including from the sports associations. Then it's a matter of working with the provinces and territories in the first place, and with the associations, to make them aware of the damage caused by that particular injury. But at the same time, what we would be doing is identifying those interventions to stop that type of activity.
Certainly with hitting from behind, if the hockey associations across the country were to ban it and, with the referees, to penalize heavily those players who hit from behind, that would stop pretty quickly. We are seeing moves in parts of some of the more junior associations to stop it. It needs to move up to the national level, because, again, you need the example of those leaders we see on TV, that they're stopping doing it and are being penalized heavily when it happens. In one of the hockey games on the weekend--professionals--there was a strong hit from behind and it wasn't called. So what type of message does that send?
Did you want to add?
12:40 p.m.
Executive Director, Safe Kids Canada
The challenge also is the culture of safety. It takes a long time. You can look to tobacco as another public health issue that's taken quite a long time to become ingrained in society as a whole and to be accepted as something that shouldn't be engaged in. There still are people who do, but....
I think what we have in front of us is.... Safe Kids has been around almost 20 years, so we've been at this for a while, and it takes quite a long time for that to become ingrained in the societal culture, which is why one of our mandates is to try to lead and inspire that culture. By doing that, as Ms. Billings indicated, we need leadership, we need champions, we need a communication mechanism to get the information out there, but also the solutions. It's not only the problem. We have to tell them what is effective and we have to try to engage those who have the ability to influence those who are in that area.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
Another example that comes to my mind is trampolines. I think it's now mandatory that you have to buy the walls around it; they must come together. Previously, there were just trampolines with kids flying off the edges.
Another question is further to my colleague's comment about seniors not being able to check the website, on which you have all these initiatives to reach out to seniors. Have you done the same thing with different cultural communities, in different languages?
12:45 p.m.
Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Planning and Public Health Integration Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada
In a number of areas we have reached out to different cultures, in different languages.
For the seniors, I'm not aware that we have, and that's probably an area we need to improve on. Sylvain can tell me I'm wrong, I hope. But I'm not aware of it.
We have in certain things. In some of the cancer areas, our data have shown significantly different risks in different cultural groups. and we have absolutely provided information and reached out to those communities and associations. This is where I think we would find some of our data gaps, in terms of the analysis, to show where there are differences as well.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
I'm thinking of the recent awareness campaign concerning car seats having expiry dates. As a parent of two small children, I didn't even know that. Now I have to go and check the expiry date.
Is it planned to include that in other languages, or trying to reach out as much as possible?
12:45 p.m.
Executive Director, Safe Kids Canada
Safe Kids has done some outreach to ethnocultural communities in a very limited way. Because of the way we're funded, we have to rely on the sponsorship we get in order to fund our activities, but we have reached out in terms of home safety issues and car seat issues to a number of ethnocultural communities, only in the Toronto area as a pilot. We have also done focus groups with them to understand that this isn't a translation of information directly, word for word. This is an understanding in the cultural context and is important information in the way it's framed. It may be the same messaging we're giving out on our website in English, but it's in a story framework or it's on the TV and radio that that community listens to and respects and where they go to get their information. But we are only touching the tip of the iceberg at this point.
12:45 p.m.
Director General, Centre for Health Promotion, Public Health Agency of Canada
Thank you for giving me more time.
I think it's safe to say the coverage is uneven in terms of reaching the special needs community and cultural communities and so on. Where the agency has a programming base, such as in the area of children, where we have the children's community programming and the pre-nutrition program, these programs that have some injury prevention aspects to their work will try to translate material where they can and where the demand justifies and so on.
For the seniors, we don't have an established funding base. We do our programming on what we fund through our existing budgets, and we are operating more on an opportunistic basis to collaborate with different organizations around Canada to move forward in certain areas. There have been some examples where we have done some translations in different languages, but it is not systematic.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
Fines versus education--I'm talking maybe car seats for children. Education works. How much do we have to rely on ticketing people for not properly having children in a car seat?
12:45 p.m.
Executive Director, Safe Kids Canada
From our experience, the legislation itself, without any kind of enforcement, has a positive effect. With enforcement, there's even more of an effect.
We have a public line that we get inquiries on, and there is some degree of importance given to those issues that have legislation attached to them. So it's not an either/or. Education is absolutely necessary, but it's not the entire picture. The legislation is important to give an indication as to the importance of an issue and in and of itself is effective, but the enforcement takes that level even higher.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joy Smith
Thank you so very much.
I do want to thank the witnesses. We've gone through two full rounds now and there's not enough time to go through a third round. But I think we've exhausted a lot of the questions the committee had today on this very, very important topic. I want to thank you all for being here to give us the insightful information that you have.
With that, I will adjourn the committee meeting today.
The meeting stands adjourned to the call of the chair.