Justice committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm Jan Westcott. I am the president and CEO of Spirits Canada. We're also known as the Association of Canadian Distillers. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to talk about our industry’s views on reducing the incidence of im

Justice committee  For a whole host of reasons, we do not support lowering the Criminal Code threshold of impairment from 0.08 to 0.05 BAC. The fact is that all Canadian provinces and territories, with the exception of Quebec, whose legislature did consider and reject adopting such administrative m

Justice committee  All of these warrant our attention. But at a time when public resources are already stretched to the breaking point, we think it would be a serious misapplication of resources to lower the existing 0.08 criminal threshold to target the 5% who had BACs between 0.05 and 0.08, inste

Justice committee  I think it's an interesting idea, just as they've built mechanisms in cars to accept cell phones, MP3 players, and those sorts of things, but if we're going to be asking auto makers to install these devices in their cars, are we also going to ask them to put in devices that will

Justice committee  Yes, we have. There are a couple of things I would say. One is that in the last 15 years there has been a much more concerted effort by all governments, and I stress the words “all governments”. I'll give you an example. Over that period of time, more and more provinces have in

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  There are a lot of them, but they're different for you than they are for Mr. Storseth, and they're different for everybody else in this room.

Justice committee  No, no. They're just different. There are different factors. That's the problem. They can take an individual and be very specific, but it varies from individual to individual. That's where that subjective judgment comes in: with police officers and other people trying to apply it

Justice committee  I would be happy to.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Jan Westcott, the president and CEO of Spirits Canada, and I'm here with my colleague, C.J. Helie, who's our executive vice-president. We're pleased to be here today in support of the Canada-European Union comprehensive economic and trade agreement,

International Trade committee  We produce pretty much everything. We produce vodka, gin, liqueurs, you name it. Predominantly our exports are whiskey, but we do export some vodka to Europe. We have a very strong liqueurs business so we also export some of those products. They are unique brands, unique flavour

International Trade committee  In large part that's driven by a renewed consumer interest, pretty much worldwide, in brown spirits, predominantly whiskey, but not exclusively. We're seeing a huge—

International Trade committee  It matters for two reasons. One, as we've indicated, is that we have identified some parts of the European Union where there is going to be greater opportunity for us. Let's be honest: some cultures are more into beer and some cultures are more oriented to wine. Many of the for

International Trade committee  As I understand it, trade negotiations are about trade-offs. You get something, the other guys get something. One of the issues going forward for Europe for a long time has been the manner in which liquor boards recover what they call import “cost of service” differentials; the

International Trade committee  Which means that we're going to buy the bottles here, which means the plants are going to run more efficiently...on and on.