Finance Committee on Nov. 5th, 2009

[The Chair, Liberal, John McCallum]

Please give a very brief response.

[Richard Rendeck]

In terms of difficulty, there should be a net benefit to SAQ, because these purchases are incremental to the sales already made by SAQ to restaurants and duty-free operators. As a duty-free operator I can only purchase my liquor from the state monopoly. The reality is that the volume of sales should increase for SAQ or LCBO because these are net new sales; these are not cannibalizing domestic sales. We're competing internationally, not within our own market.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McCallum]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. Block, please.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to each of you for presenting here this morning.

My first two questions will be for Dr. Pereira.

In your submission, you referred to the universality of dying and that there ought to be a sufficient shared interest in quality process outcomes. I'm wondering if you could tell me what is happening at the provincial level in regard to this issue.

[Dr. José Pereira]

At the provincial level it's a hodgepodge. There are centres of excellence and there are regions with excellent coverage. In Alberta, for example, they have been able to reallocate acute care dollars. They haven't taken any more new dollars; they have just reallocated acute care dollars to invest into proper home care palliative programs and hospices. It's turned out, at the very least, to be neutral to the health system. People are not dying in acute hospitals, but have access to hospices and good home care.

In other provinces, that's not the case. In many provinces, hospices, for example, are struggling to make ends meet. There's a threat that many of them will close down. That ricochets down the system, because those patients sitting in acute care units who cannot go home for whatever reason and are ending up in hospital, but need good palliative care and end-of-life care, stay in those acute beds at great cost to the system. Then people who come into the emergency rooms needing acute care for pneumonia and blood clots cannot get into those beds.

If we reinvest and reallocate in a standardized way across the country, we can see great changes in the system.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you.

For my second question, I'll just refer to something my colleague said in terms of dying with dignity and physician-assisted suicide. We often hear of dying with dignity when we hear that.

Could you define dignity, or expand on dignity for me?

[Dr. José Pereira]

That's a core question and it goes to this great debate that we as a society are engaged in. It's interesting, because it's terminology that gets thrown around a lot without us really understanding it and with many of us imposing what we think on someone else in terms of quality of life or dignity.

Interestingly, over the last eight years the palliative care community, with some of the money that came through from CHIR, has gone to terminal patients asking them, what does dignity mean for you? I have a colleague in Winnipeg who's done most of this work. I once asked him to summarize in one sentence what that means. He said to me, dignity is how I see myself in your eyes.

I am reminded of when I worked in Switzerland, in the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, which is the university hospital that was the first hospital to allow assisted suicide within its walls in Switzerland. The reason why that occurred in that hospital was because a gentleman was admitted with an advanced disease. Cancer had gone to the various parts of the body. He was too weak to go back home. He had no family at home. He lived on the fifth floor of an apartment without elevators.

After two months sitting in acute hospital, out of desperation, he said, “This is not quality of life. I want you to end my life.” Instead of responding by asking the questions as a society, what are our social networks, how can we value you as a person, and how can we provide you that dignity you say you don't have at the moment, the response was to look at assisted suicide as an option to introduce in the hospital.

I think we need to have this discussion. It's an incredibly important debate. One of the recommendations we are asking for—the $20 million a year for at least five years—is so we can engage the public in these discussions and inform the public and health professionals as well.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you.

I have one more question. This would be for the Canadian Vintners Association. You have brought forward interesting suggestions on four items, all of which have merit. If you were to put a priority ranking on them, what would your order of importance be?

[Dan Paszkowski]

I think if we were to put a priority ranking on them, number one would probably be the vintners' investment tax credit. Given that we have limited sales opportunities in Canada, we really have to make sure that our wine facilities not only have the best infrastructure to produce the best-quality wine, but also the infrastructure to attract tourists to be able to sell wine from the wine gate.

The second would be the excise tax exemption on the Canadian content in blended wines. The government went halfway by exempting the excise tax on 100% VQA wines; however, they're the same grapes that are going into the product, and they're limiting our profitability as we get consumed by foreign wines.

The third would be the small business tax deduction thresholds, which haven't been indexed to inflation.

The fourth is an equity issue, and that's on the replacement plantings.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

I have one more question, just following up on what you said about the excise tax on blended wines. Currently what is the excise tax on blended wines?

[Dan Paszkowski]

The excise tax is 62¢ per litre.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

How does that compare with other products such as beer and spirits produced here in Canada?

[Dan Paszkowski]

They're different products and there are different categories for different per cent alcohols. For beer, anything over 2.5% would be 31¢ per litre, and for spirits, it would be 29.5¢ per litre for low alcohol spirits. Anything over 7% would be based on ethyl alcohol content, so it would be roughly $11.70 per litre of ethyl alcohol.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Massimo Pacetti]

Thank you, Ms. Block.

Mr. Atamanenko for seven minutes.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you very much for your very enlightening presentations.

Dan, it's good to see you here again. It's also an honour to be sitting beside Roger Jackson, who was at UBC the same time I was there. He was one of these disciplined athletes, rowing every morning for two hours. I was part of Frank Gnup's rowdy football bunch.

Alex, you may remember I was struggling to get across the pool at the chateau, and you were up there giving me encouragement. So thanks for being here.

I'll try to be quick. Ms. Reynolds, a lot of us are trying to mount a campaign against HST, across the political spectrum in B.C. We're working at it, and I think we've been in communication. If it doesn't work, would it satisfy your association if HST were exempt from meals so that you wouldn't have this competition with these ready-to-eat foods?

[Joyce Reynolds]

That would be the best-case scenario for our sector.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

The second question is, we hear a lot about credit cards, but we don't hear a lot about the campaign whereby the banks are getting into the Visas and the Visas are getting into the debit cards. The small businesses that I talked to worry that this will be catastrophic. Are you getting any positive response in your campaign in that regard?

[Joyce Reynolds]

Right now Visa and MasterCard are in the process of rolling out new debit products, and they're doing so in a way that is very concerning to our members. There are things like a percentage fee on debit cards. They're doing some priority routing to their debit card over Interac, which is not something that the restaurants have been informed about or have authorized. They won't allow you to continue to accept their credit card product if you don't accept their debit card product. So there are all kinds of practices that our members don't know how to respond to. They don't know how to react, and they are really looking to their associations and to their government to navigate this whole new world of Visa and MasterCard moving into debit products.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you.

Turning to physical activity, Ms. Grantham, I understand the situation. I understand that obesity, diabetes, and clogged arteries are being found in kids and I understand the savings through health. If we had this money, how would we do it specifically? We found in the past that when moneys have been given to provinces, especially in my province of B.C., it's often not targeted towards education, for example. It goes somewhere else. We know that budgets today are being cut in British Columbia, and a lot of that will involve cutting down on physical education.

Is there some specific way that this money can get into the school system? Do you have any suggestions? In other words, how specifically can we get these kids moving again?

[Andrea Grantham]

We have a national plan, a pan-Canadian strategy, that has laid out many areas where we could take a more comprehensive approach to addressing physical activity in Canada for all levels of the population.

In terms of physical education in schools--a personal passion of mine--absolutely there needs to be more leadership towards making it a mandated requirement in every province, ensuring that resources are in place for qualified physical educators to be delivering the subject to students, and that adequate time is put in the curriculum to ensure that the kids are receiving the quality programs in their resources, tools, and equipment. That's certainly one component of this national strategy that would allow us, with better investment, to take a much more comprehensive, planned, and targeted approach to work together federally and with our provinces.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you.

Dr. Jackson, I come from the Kootenays, and we have some really top-notch biathletes there, and some of them are spending a lot of money out of pocket. Is this money just for those people once they're on the Olympic team, or does that go to other national programs gearing up to the Olympics? Obviously, if we want to have good athletes, we need to support them, but at what level would this money kick in?

[Dr. Roger Jackson]

In the first five years, all of the money has been spent on targeted athletes, which includes junior national teams as well as national team athletes. As we go forward, we recognize, exactly as you said, that the depth and quality of our programs are weak. Only in hockey and curling can we say that we have national depth in our program. Other than that, almost every sport is struggling. So as we go forward, we want to support more junior and developmental athletes, and we're looking not at a five-year target but at each year as leading to the next two Olympic games.

We're going to be working in partnership with the provinces. We've begun discussions with the Province of British Columbia. In fact, I have a meeting next Friday with the deputy minister to talk exactly about how we're going to coordinate the national program with his provincial program.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Cox, I have a couple of questions. One, I met with the Canadian Federation of Students, and I learned that the average debt of those finishing degrees is around $37,000. What's the average debt of graduate students? Do you know?

[Graham Cox]

I don't know that off the top of my head, but it's certainly higher than that.