Bill C-398 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act (food labelling)

Food and Drugs Act

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to take part in today's debate on Bill C-398, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act relating to food labelling. I wish to thank the member for Scarborough Southwest for initiating this debate and presenting the House with an important issue that ought to be pursued in great detail and given serious consideration.

As members of Parliament, we have become used to debating important health issues that affect Canadians from coast to coast to coast and we are used to debating those issues during private members' hour. At least we give some consideration to important issues, but unfortunately that reflects the fact that the government has failed to show the leadership that Canadians expect by introducing such changes through governmental proposals.

It sometimes appears as if the government believes that health promotion is not worth pursuing if it somehow impacts on someone's profit margins. It is as if these issues are either seen as minor and insignificant, or that they are to be avoided because they get in the way of some Industry Canada agenda.

We have encountered this kind of scenario on a number of occasions. I want to refer briefly to the struggle we have had in this place trying to convince the Government of Canada to address seriously the issue of mandatory labelling of genetically modified foods. That has been a matter that has been before the House in numerous different ways, through private members' initiatives and committee work, yet to this day the government has resisted allowing Parliament to have a vote, to make a decision, and to make recommendations.

I also want to reference the issue of labelling in terms of alcohol beverage containers. Members will know that it is a matter which I presented to the House and received overwhelming support from members of all parties. However, the matter of informing pregnant women about the dangers of drinking when expecting a baby has yet to be pursued in concrete terms by the government of the day.

It is important that we keep raising these issues of health promotion and health protection, and hope the government will act at some point on the wishes of parliamentarians and Canadians.

The central issue of the bill before us deals with the question of providing Canadian consumers with health information. That is a very important matter. Let us reference the report released last month by the World Health Organization entitled “Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Disease”. That report detailed in part the scientific evidence concerning the relationship between diet and disease. It urged the global community to design strategies to address these serious problems. The findings of that report cry out for innovative measures and for proactive positions by the Government of Canada. That is why the bill before us is so important.

Let us also put it in the context of the recently released Romanow report, which identified the need to tackle disease prevention much more aggressively. In his final report, Commissioner Romanow reminded us that more than 90% of adult onset diabetes and 80% of coronary heart disease could be prevented through an improved diet in combination with exercise and not smoking. Diet plays a significant role in the development and treatment of many chronic diseases. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, osteoporosis, and some forms of cancer wreak havoc on tens of thousands of Canadians and their families every year.

As many as 25,000 Canadians die each year from cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes alone. The toll is great in terms of human cost and in the loss of surviving family members and loved ones.

Of course we have to remember that there is considerable financial cost, not only to individuals but to our entire system. These costs are incurred because of the poor dietary choices, often ill-informed choices, that we make.

My colleague, the member for Churchill, wanted me to mention in today's debate that for a person like herself who has high cholesterol, it makes a big difference to have appropriate information and labelling details so she can make informed decisions to avoid relying on very high cost cholesterol drugs. That point should never be forgotten in this debate.

Canada loses an estimated $6.3 billion per year in health care spending and lost productivity through diet related disease. Mr. Romanow in his report pointed out that in the single year of 1997 obesity cost Canadians $1.8 billion in medical costs. These figures continue to mount. According to the government's own calculations, 15.2% were obese in 2001. We are now more likely to be obese than adults in most other OECD countries.

The tragedy of all of this is that diet related diseases are preventable. The irony is that the government has finally acknowledged the importance of identifying problems associated with diet and has taken some responsibility in terms of nutritional labelling. However it has refused to go the extra step to ensure that we have taken advantage of every opportunity to inform consumers about diet and about choleric content.

That is why we have to give very serious consideration to the bill. The bill before us may not be perfect. There may be some issues that can be dealt with at committee but it is in overall terms a very important contribution to the debate. It ought to be approved and forwarded to a standing committee for further deliberations and to hear from various witnesses.

We know the hotel and restaurant association has expressed concerns. We know there are questions around how this would be enforced and implemented and what the cost would be. Those are issues that ought to be pursued at the committee which would receive the legislation. Under no circumstances should those concerns be the barrier to further deliberations by the House on this very serious legislative proposal.

Bill C-398 attempts to do a fairly simple thing. It insists that all foods sold in Canadian retail stores and at least large restaurant chains be required to disclose the amounts of nutrients that are important from a public health perspective. In the end Canadians will have to make up their own minds about what foods to choose for their families and themselves when they do their grocery shopping or order a restaurant meal.

Canadians today spend 30% of their food budgets on restaurant and cafeteria meals and that percentage is rising. Yet very few restaurants provide point of purchase nutrition information.

What we support today is the idea that there should be access to this fundamental information in to make healthy choices without having to be professional nutrition experts. Fast food restaurants and food marketers generally recognize that Canadians want healthy options. We see all sorts of promotions, whether salads or subs, but we are still here today fighting for the right to know whether these products live up to their claims.

Food and health are two, yet the same issue. Canadians deserve to determine their future health by more than guess work, and guess work is what the government has been offering so far. We have with this bill a constructive proposition to address this serious matter. We have a proposal that deserves consideration by parliamentarians in this chamber and at the committee level.

I would urge members to consider the value of the work and the contribution by the member for Scarborough Southwest and to give support for this legislative proposal to go the next step.

[John Duncan, Canadian Alliance, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to speak on this private member's bill, Bill C-398, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act, a bill which would require mandatory nutrition labelling in French and English for imported or packaged meat, poultry or seafood for retail sale, applying to businesses with gross annual revenues of more than $500,000. It would require that food sold for immediate consumption, for example, in restaurants, hotels and vending machines, include posted nutritional information such as caloric and fat content, applying to business with gross annual revenues of more than $10 million. It would require that prepackaged, multi-ingredient foods show the percentage, by weight, of important and “emphasized” ingredients.

The intent of the bill is a noble one: to provide Canadians with more information about the foods they consume. Who would not welcome the prospect of more information about what we put into our bodies every day to give us energy and keep us alive?

We are now living in an age when Canadians are taking more and more responsibility for their health. I even heard on the radio this morning that the longest lived Canadians come from British Columbia. I am so proud of that, because that is where I am from. I think it has a lot to do with people taking personal responsibility for their health and for disease prevention.

Health Canada estimates the health burden of poor diet in Canada at $6.3 billion annually, including direct health care costs of $1.8 billion. Yet when it comes to translating the noble goal of providing or requiring more health information into practice, it is not always easy. We know this from the debate over the labelling of foods containing GMOs.

The Canadian Alliance has a number of concerns about this legislation. I would like to address some of my concerns in my remarks today.

Health Canada announced new regulations for prepackaged food on January 1, 2003. These are Health Canada regulations that can be contrasted with this private member's bill. The new regulations require most food labels to carry a mandatory nutrition facts table listing calories and 13 key nutrients. Foods exempted include fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh unground meat and poultry, and food sold in restaurants. Bill C-398 would close the exemptions for meat products and restaurant foods. Undoubtedly there are good reasons why Health Canada exempted meat products and restaurant foods from the new regulations. We have a good sense of why and I will get to that shortly.

It should be noted that Health Canada is giving companies up to three years to implement the changes, and five years for small businesses. Bill C-398 that is before us today would take effect after two years. I do not know the reason for that discrepancy.

I will go on to some of my specific concerns. If passed, Bill C-398 would likely have its largest impact on Canadian restaurants and on the customers that patronize them. If passed, the bill would require chain restaurants to provide the calorie content of their products on menu boards and fat and sodium content on menus. The Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association says this proposal would be “highly impractical and unworkable for food service operators”.

An obvious concern for the CRFA is the fact that many restaurants have menus that continually change and dishes that are sold in countless combinations. The Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association also notes, “The magnitude and permutation of ingredients used by most restaurants reach staggering proportions”.

I can illustrate this with a quote from the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association:

The make-up of a sandwich consisting of just 5 items or toppings (such as bread, meat, cheese, lettuce and tomato) can be ordered in 120 ways. A sub comprised of 10 items or toppings could provide 3,628,800 combinations. When the items for a sub are expanded to 15, then 1.3 trillion combinations are possible, making it virtually impossible to accurately communicate calorie or fat content on a menu or menu board for the vast majority of restaurant menu items.

An important consideration identified by the CRFA is that national restaurant chains and franchises operate thousands of different locations, each one being the equivalent of a small business. Many of these operators rely on regional suppliers creating significant differences in the ingredients of similar menu items.

This incredibly complicates the whole issue. It should be noted that most restaurant chains already have nutritional information about their products available on request. This information may include details such as diabetic or allergy concerns that may be more important than the provisions announced in the bill. I have a daughter with a potentially lethal allergy to peanuts. I know how careful people must be regarding many of these allergies.

That outlines some of the impact of Bill C-398 on quick service restaurant chains. The Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association notes that the proposed legislation would also apply to full service restaurant chains and hotel food service where the selection of menu items is much broader, menu items change frequently, and daily specials are common.

The laboratory analysis mentioned that is required to determine the nutritional content of just one menu item can cost in excess of $150 and generally takes a minimum of two weeks. This is unworkable and we can be sure that such costs will be passed on to the consumer.

The Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association says that from a cost and timing perspective, it would be impossible for the vast majority of large and small restaurant and food service operators to meet the requirements of this private member's bill.

I want to talk about the provisions in the bill on emphasized ingredients and raise some concerns about the bill's provisions. This is found in the bill's suggested amendments to section 5.3 of the Food and Drugs Act. Bill C-398 specifies that where ingredients:

...are emphasized on a food label by words or pictures, the label shall indicate the percentage by weight of the emphasized ingredients (a) beside the emphasized words or pictures, or(b) beside the common name of the food,in characters at least 50 percent the size of those employed in the common name of the food.

These provisions are complex and confusing. Who will decide whether ingredients are emphasized and how will they decide this? This formula is unworkable. Health Canada's proposed labelling standards are more feasible.

In conclusion, the intent of this bill is commendable. I hope I have demonstrated that some of the provisions of the bill are cumbersome, confusing or simply impractical. We should not impose an unnecessary regulatory burden on food processors, importers and restaurant chains. We must consider what the financial impact will be on these same food importers, processors, restaurants and of course, the consumer. I will be opposing the bill.

[Tom Wappel, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

moved that Bill C-398, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act (food labelling), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Madam Speaker, more than ever Canadians are interested in protecting their health by improving their diet. The Government of Canada has begun and should continue to encourage their efforts to do so.

Indeed, earlier this year the Minister of Health took a big step in this direction by ensuring that manufacturers provide full nutrition information on most foods sold in retail stores. In doing so, Canada joined the United States, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand and more recently a half dozen other developed and developing countries in obliging manufacturers to disclose the amounts of key nutrients on labels of prepackaged foods.

These regulations, which came into force in January of this year, were announced in the fall of 2000. I have been working on nutritional labelling since 1989 and I was pleased that the proposed regulations closely mirrored the bill I then had before the House. That bill had the broad support of Canadians as well as parliamentarians of all parties.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada economists estimate that the health benefits in terms of health care cost savings and productivity gains resulting from the dietary changes triggered by mandatory nutrition labelling will be 20 times the costs of modifying food labels.

It is indeed a rare occasion when we as MPs are called upon to support policies that promise that impressive amount of economic payoff. My bill simply extends the principle of mandatory nutrition labelling to more types of food so as to capture more of those economic and health benefits.

A lot of Canadians are following this debate. Support for the measures proposed in Bill C-398 extend beyond the reaches of the parliamentary precinct.

Despite the short notice for this debate, I have been receiving a steady stream of letters of support from health and citizens groups since last Friday. The list is long. I will name a few to give the House a sense of the breadth of community support. The list includes the National Pensioners' and Senior Citizens' Federation; the Community Nutritionists Council of British Columbia; the Ontario Society of Nutrition Professionals in Public Health; the Canadian Women's Health Network; Vive, l'Union des consommateurs; the Toronto Food Policy Council; the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology; the HEAL Network of Northern British Columbia; the National Eating Disorder Information Centre; the National Retired Workers' Advisory Council; and the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, which is a non-partisan consumer health organization financially supported by over 100,000 subscribers to its Nutrition Action Healthletter.

Ensuring that consumers have ready access to useful information about the nutritional composition of food is critical to help reduce the human and economic toll of diet related disease estimated to cost $6.3 billion in health care spending and lost productivity and cause as many as 25,000 deaths annually in Canada due to cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes. If unchecked, these costs will likely increase substantially in the coming years as a result of rising pharmaceutical drug costs, the aging baby boom population and rising rates of obesity.

The World Health Organization has also recognized that diet plays a key role in disease prevention. In its October 2002 World Health Report , the WHO estimated that healthy life expectancy can be increased by as much as 6.5 years in countries like Canada by avoiding the top 25 preventable health risks. However, the report found that in countries like Canada, virtually all preventable deaths examined are attributable to four diet related factors: blood cholesterol, blood pressure, being overweight and low fruit and vegetable intake, as well as physical inactivity and smoking.

A growing body of evidence indicates that health promotion efforts can reduce medical costs and productivity losses, with studies demonstrating as much as $4 to $5 in savings for every $1 invested in health promotion. A recent report of the Auditor General noted, “Preventive health activities are estimated to be 6 to 45 times more effective than dealing with health problems after the fact”.

As I said, the federal government announced these very good mandatory nutrition labelling rules on January 1, 2003. The new nutrition labelling rules are predicted to lower the direct and indirect economic losses due to diet related disease by at least $5 billion over the next two decades by reducing premature deaths and disabilities due to coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

This represents an estimated twentyfold return to the economy as a whole compared to the private sector expenditures incurred to modify food labels. These predicted cost savings, although an impressive first start, constitute only 4% to 7% of the total costs of diet related disease. My bill is an effort to capture more of those economic and health benefits.

For instance, the new regulations exempted fresh meat, poultry and seafood, except ground meat, and all foods sold in restaurants. Bill C-398 is in part an attempt to close these two important loopholes.

Nutrition information is particularly important as a decision making tool for selecting meat, poultry and seafood because of variation in the nutritional composition of these types of foods, which cannot be accurately estimated by consumers using visual inspection.

For instance, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a three ounce serving of trimmed, broiled top round beefsteak has only one gram of saturated fat, while a three ounce serving of trimmed, broiled shoulder blade pork steak has four grams of saturated fat. That is a fourfold difference in saturated fat content between two cuts of meat that are the same size. It is very unlikely that consumers looking at the two would know that one has four times as much saturated fat.

Some meat industry lobbyists successfully urged the government to exempt fresh meat from nutrition labelling because, they said, they did not have reliable, representative nutrition profiles of the numerous cuts of meat. However, one organization, the Beef Information Centre, which is a division of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, supplies detailed nutrition composition information for 106 cuts of beef on its website. Others provide similar information, which appears to refute the information-poor claims of the industry.

Some of these groups are apparently working with federal government officials to calculate these figures. The bill gives those technical discussions a focus. Bill C-398 would ensure that manufacturers will have to share that information with consumers so they can in turn use it to select types of meat with amounts of saturated fat, vitamins and minerals that are acceptable to them.

Bill C-398 offers a workable adaptation of the nutrition labelling rules to be applied to chain restaurants. In the bill, restaurants with more than $10 million in annual sales, and for all intents and purposes that means chain restaurants, would be obliged to report the amount of calories on menu boards. Restaurants with table service would be obliged to report the amounts of calories, sodium, and saturated plus trans fats on menus, where there is more space.

We are no strangers to the havoc that restaurant and fast food meals can have on our health. Our hectic schedules are more like our constituents' lives, especially those with young children, than we know. Sadly, heart disease has cut short or slowed down the work of a number of our colleagues in the House. Likewise, poor diet prematurely kills thousands of Canadians every year as a result of diet related cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Canadians spend 30% of their food budgets on restaurant and cafeteria meals, yet it is virtually impossible to find nutrition information at restaurants. To make healthful food choices, Canadians ought to be able to see relevant health information about menu options at the point of sale. Caloric content, for instance, is at least as important as price in making product choices and it is at least as difficult as price to estimate, yet only price is displayed on menu boards.

We certainly would not expect consumers to check the company websites to find the price of foods, or to ask a waiter to recite the sodium and saturated fat content of all the menu choices until we found one that met our nutrition objectives. This minimum amount of information could very easily and for very little expense be provided on menus or menu boards for the standardized menu choices we see at chain restaurants. If this type of information were available, I am confident our diets would change for the better as a result.

Bill C-398 also requires packaged foods to disclose the percentage by weight of key ingredients, especially fruits, vegetables, added sugars and whole grains. This will help prevent misleading ingredient claims like we often see on products called “fruit” cocktail that are really mostly sugar and water or on products “made with whole grains” that use mostly refined flour. However, it will also help consumers choose products that have higher amounts of healthful ingredients or lower amounts of unhealthful ingredients.

There is widespread scientific agreement about the health benefits of consuming adequate amounts of fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains and about the adverse health effects of consuming foods high in added sugars. For instance, scientists agree that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is associated with a lower risk of several cancers, lower rates of stroke and lower blood pressure, but about two-thirds of Canadians do not consume the recommended five to ten servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Many processed foods purporting to contain fruits and vegetables as ingredients contain only trace amounts of them without disclosing that fact on the label.

The World Health Organization issued a report in March 2003 called “Diet, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Chronic Disease”, noting that many foods contribute protective or causative effects on chronic disease risk that cannot yet be reduced to the metabolic effects of particular nutrients.

The WHO report identified 14 classes of foods that are often used as ingredients in processed foods and play very important roles, protective or causative, in the causation of non-communicable chronic diseases.

In addition to adequate breastfeeding and consumption of appropriate amounts of certain nutrients, the WHO report determined that there is convincing or probable evidence establishing links between cardiovascular disease, cancer, or type II diabetes and the following foods and ingredients: the protective foods, such as fruits; vegetables, excluding tubers; whole grain cereals; legumes; fish and fish oils; and unsalted nuts, provided that the caloric intake is not exceeded; and the causative foods, such as foods and drinks rich in added or free sugars; unfiltered boiled coffee; some forms of salted or fermented fish; high temperature foods; preserved meats such as sausage, salami, bacon and ham; and salted meats, pickles and other foods.

The five classes of ingredients identified in Bill C-398, namely fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and added sugars, constitute a practical subset of the 14 classes of ingredients the WHO expert report determined to be related to the risk for chronic diseases.

In closing, disease prevention is the most direct way of alleviating financial pressure on the health care system because it involves both decreasing the need for health care services by Canadians and, at the same time, increasing the ability of Canadians to help finance health care through increased labour productivity by contributing to the other side of the health care ledger.

Meaningful information can help consumers to make decisions that promote disease prevention. An informed consumer is an educated consumer. An educated consumer is a healthful consumer, one who will contribute to minimizing the increasing health care budget by preventing disease with educated consumption. This fact is what lead to mandatory nutritional labelling, which came into force on January 1, 2003. My bill closes a few loopholes left by omissions in the regulations. Its passage will benefit all of us directly in contributing to more beneficial dietary habits, and as a country, by helping prevent rather than treat numerous diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes. I ask all colleagues to support the bill.

[Tom Wappel, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-398, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act (food labelling).

Mr. Speaker, for years I have been working to ensure mandatory information and labelling on foods in Canada and for years the Department of Health kept insisting that it should be done on a volunteer basis.

Finally, in November of 2000 the Minister of Health announced regulations to ensure mandatory nutritional labelling of food. However, not everything is covered.

The bill would amend the Food and Drugs Act to specify the type of information that is to be provided on the labels of imported and prepackaged foods, and of foods sold for immediate consumption.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)