Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the invitation to appear before the committee.
The Centre for Science in the Public Interest is a non-profit consumer health advocacy organization specializing in nutrition issues, with offices in Ottawa and Washington, D.C.
Our Ottawa health advocacy is funded by more than 100,000 subscribers to our monthly Nutrition Action Healthletter, which is read by more than 1,000 residents in most federal ridings. CSPI does not accept funding from industry or government, and Nutrition Action does not carry advertisements.
Diet-related disease is an urgent public health problem in this country. Every year, diet-related cases of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer prematurely end the lives of tens of thousands of Canadians. Health Canada estimates it robs the Canadian economy of $6.6 billion due to health care costs and lost productivity. These numbers describe real, avoidable deaths and financial losses, both on a grand scale.
Plainly, tackling diet-related disease needn't involve significant program expenditures in every case. For instance, we hope the government, members of this committee, and their caucus colleagues will support the expansion of existing nutrition labelling rules when Bill C-283 comes to a vote in the House of Commons on November 8.
The current regulations are predicted to reduce the burden of diet-related disease by approximately 4% by producing $5 billion in cumulative economic benefits in the coming two decades at a non-recurring cost of about one-fifth of 1% of food sales for a single year during the phase-in period--in other words, a minimum 2,000% return on investment.
Today I will focus mainly on food tax reform because it is probably the best studied, most promising economic incentive for healthy living.
Recommendations to reform food taxes have been advanced in expert reports published--and I won't give the entire list--in the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Institute of Medicine.
Notably, the federal-provincial-territorial integrated pan-Canadian healthy living strategy, which was supported by ministers of health of all political stripes, recommends that Canadian governments, “Undertake [a] feasibility study on fiscal measures to encourage healthy living (i.e. tax credits/penalties, subsidies, price supports, etc. )”.