Thank you very much.
I see Bill C-6 as a bit of an historic opportunity. It's not very often that Parliament receives legislation as powerful as this: legislation that creates a whole new framework for corporate responsibility and removes some of the leg irons from health inspectors and allows them to respond to product-based health threats as they are happening.
I'm a fan of this bill, but I'm here to encourage you to amend the bill to ensure that it achieves its objectives and doesn't allow harmful compounds or products to remain improperly regulated.
As a start, I urge you to begin with the recommendation of the Canadian Cancer Society to delete subclause 4(2). Unless amended, this bill will put stronger legal obligations on the manufacturers of floor polish than it will on tobacco manufacturers. I think this is not consistent with our usual approach to targeting the most harmful products.
I hope you'll go further, however, than just changing a statutory exemption into a regulatory exemption, and that you'll see the value of amending the bill to bring tobacco companies' responsibilities in line with those of other manufacturers. We've circulated an amendment that proposes to do this. This amendment would narrow any regulatory exemption for tobacco products to only those products that were on the market on the day that Bill C-6 was introduced in the House.
Tobacco is a historic mistake. We inherited it as a problem. Our parents inherited it as a problem. Unless we do things differently, our children will inherit it as a problem. But the mistakes of the past don't have to be repeated in the future, and they don't have to be repeated in Bill C-6.
The amendment we propose would make 2009 the year when the special exemptions for tobacco companies come to an end. It would not remove the legal supply of cigarettes; it would draw a line in time that accepts the mistakes of the past by exempting existing products but refuses to continue that mistake into the indefinite future.
I'd like to illustrate the need for this approach by presenting the novelty tobacco products that I brought with me today. The clerk, I believe, has circulated one or two. I have a box of others.
About four years ago, tobacco companies exploited some loopholes in the Tobacco Act to launch kid-friendly flavoured tobacco products. With no health warnings, bright colours, and affordable packaging, they look innocuous. These products are inherently harmful, as are all tobacco products, but they are also unreasonably harmful because they're packaged and designed to lure non-smokers into smoking, and because they're packaged in ways to defeat health regulations.
Health Canada would have been the first to know about these products, and the first to receive the survey results showing that the marketing of these products had reached one in three Canadian kids aged one to 19, and that half of the kids who smoked these products never smoked cigarettes. Yet Health Canada did not have the tools to get these products off the market in a timely way. They still don't.
I'm hopeful that Parliament will soon address this serious problem. Bill C-348, introduced by Ms. Wasylycia-Leis earlier this spring, will do the trick and deserves your active support. The Prime Minister has also promised to bring in a government bill that will hopefully also receive strong support from all sides of the House. One way or another, we need a law soon.
Bill C-6 will not solve the problem of these products. It's too late for that. That barn door is open and the horse is gone. But these products exhibit the general problem that Bill C-6 would fix in the future.
The inventiveness of tobacco product companies has not been exhausted. Since Parliament passed the Tobacco Act in 1997, more than 80 patents and 100 trademarks have been filed. The trademarks and patents of today are the products of tomorrow. Traditional laws like the Tobacco Act are not up to the task. They can't pull products off the shelves.
We are told that these products, even when they're banned, will have to stay on the shelves until the supply is exhausted. They are dangerous enough to be taken off the market, yet curiously, we expect consumers—in this case consumers we know to be children—to buy and smoke every last one. The Ontario government banned these products in December, yet on Tuesday I bought the ones I've provided today for you--five months later.
In contrast, Bill C-6, if adopted, could see future products of this type taken off the shelves immediately if a company tried to market them. But its biggest strength would be in the general prohibition clauses of the law. Companies would stop marketing new products unless they could make their products safe enough to satisfy clause 7 of the law, which is the general obligation to not sell products that are a danger to human health or safety.
I see Bill C-6 as an excellent complement to the aging Tobacco Act. The two acts together will, for the first time, make it possible to effectively prevent product marketing for tobacco.
On Tuesday, I listened carefully to the rationale given for the statutory exemption for tobacco products. If I heard correctly, the department's reasons were twofold. First, they felt the Tobacco Act was sufficient. Second, they didn't want to be taken to court by tobacco companies. I don't share their view that the Tobacco Act is sufficient. Also, I find it revealing of the continuing power of tobacco companies to bully the government into inaction that the department would even cite concerns about going to court.
Parliament made an understandable mistake in 1969 when it failed to include tobacco products in the first Hazardous Products Act. But there have been several subsequent attempts by parliamentarians to fix that mistake. On at least two occasions, the House of Commons and Senate have worked independently of government officials to include tobacco in the Hazardous Products Act. Once was in 1988 with Bill C-204, which had advertising restrictions, and the second time was in 2004 with Bill C-260, on flammability standards. Tellingly, both times, elected members worked across party lines to create a law within Parliament, not just use Parliament to pass a law drafted elsewhere.
Twice before, this House has worked together to insert tobacco products into consumer product safety law, where I think it properly belongs. I hope you will see the merits of doing so a third time.
Thank you.
