Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada is one of Canada's leading health charities, and we're pleased to be celebrating our fiftieth anniversary this year. Over those fifty years we have invested about a billion dollars in research, raised from donors twenty bucks at a time.
Thanks for inviting us to speak to you today to address some of the questions you've put to us. I want to thank you as well for a number of recent initiatives that came out of this committee, I believe. Investments in a strategy for chronic disease and healthy living couldn't have been more timely, and there were tax incentive measures in the last federal budget for children and youth involved in organized sports, and the purchase of public transit passes. In addition, there was the capital gains elimination on gifts of listed securities to charities. So we do appreciate that progress has been made.
The good news is that mortality and hospitalization rates due to cardiovascular disease have been dropping for a number of years. You have a graph in your notes. The bad news is the burden is still enormous. Heart disease and stroke represent the leading cause of death, the leading cause of hospitalizations, the leading disease-based cost driver in the economy, and the leading cause of drug prescriptions. It has become the leading cause of death world-wide. It's a huge burden on the health system, driving costs upwards, and we need to focus on prevention.
More bad news is that obesity, a major risk factor for heart disease, has increased over the past 25 years across all age groups. Our children are not only not immune; they are proving to be the most susceptible. We must ask ourselves, if obesity rates are projected to increase, will 60 become the new 70, and 30 the new 50? Rising obesity rates could have the effect of undoing much of our progress in tobacco reduction.
The increasing rate of type 2 diabetes is truly shocking. We are at risk of turning back the clock in our fight against cardiovascular disease. We're coming to you to say that we need to use the lessons learned from the tobacco control to fight this epidemic. Education is important, but it's far from sufficient. To truly tackle the obesity epidemic, a wide variety of public policy interventions are needed, including federal tax incentives and program spending measures. So I want to speak to the first question you have put to us.
The HSFC recommends that the federal government continue to utilize tax incentives to promote physical activity and healthy living. You should increase the tax credit for children and youth participating in organized sports from $500 to $1,000. You should extend the organized sports tax credit to adults. You should provide tax credits to all Canadians for participation in non-organized sports, and you should remove the GST from products that promote physical activity, such as bicycles and skates.
We also need the government to remove a disincentive that has been created by a recent federal government program. As I mentioned, health charities invest $150 million a year in health research. The federal government now pays 24 cents on the dollar to universities for every dollar that CIHR spends on health research, for the indirect costs of research, such as heating and lighting in our universities.
The federal government needs to remove the disincentive this has established against health charity-funded research--which the universities are now beginning to say they don't wish--or ask the health charities to pay it. The result will be that though we've been the leading funder of health research in this country for many years, we will have to take money from our life-saving research to fund the heating and lighting in universities. This means that the government will be competing with charities and communities that are trying to support themselves. It will hinder Canadians who are trying to lighten the load on the federal government, in terms of health research funding, by funding it themselves, and it will lead to double-taxing Canadians.
The HSFC therefore recommends that the federal government look at this program in terms of its disincentive.
You also asked us about infrastructure. HSFC recommends that the federal government allocate at least seven percent of transportation-related infrastructure toward the development of community infrastructure that promotes the use of active modes of transportation, and includes social infrastructure that facilitates physical activity, such as parks and community recreation centres, as an eligible expense under the gas tax program.
Finally, in addition to physical infrastructure, this government needs to better support data infrastructure. Health surveillance data is appallingly lacking in Canada. We cannot support health research, program development, health practice, and program evaluation with the level of health surveillance we have in this country. It's a huge issue.
Thank you very much.