Absolutely. I'm happy to touch on that.
From an industry perspective, we always like to say that beer has a lot of positive attributes. It's a product that is made from raw agricultural inputs. Canadian brewers purchase over 300,000 tonnes of prairie malt barley every year. We're very proud of that. It's also low in alcohol, compared with some other beverage alcohol categories. It's also low in sugar. I'm not sure if many people around this table are aware, but last year the federal government did take the step of amending the federal definition of beer. By law, a product that's labelled as a beer in Canada must contain less than 4% by weight of sugar. Thank you for the initiative on that. We're happy that we were able to get that through last year.
The proposal we're talking about here was put forward for two reasons. Yes, the first reason was to stimulate some growth in investment in an underdeveloped segment of a struggling beer industry. It was also put forward as a response to Canada's national alcohol strategy and the World Health Organization's global alcohol strategy, which call on governments to introduce these types of incentives to promote more production of lower-alcohol products as a way to reduce alcohol-related harms and also as a way to reduce a person's total alcohol consumption.
I just want to emphasize that, first of all, what we're putting forward here today requires very little government investment. It's also not new. A lot of other countries have similar excise systems in place. There's no excise tax in Spain on non-alcohol beer. The U.K. just introduced some changes. The European Commission put forward a directive last year that allows European countries to raise the alcohol content from 2.8% to 3.5% ABV that they apply reduced rates to. There is evidence that this is a good way to encourage a healthy lifestyle.
Outside of the alcohol conversation, I'm not sure if you guys have sampled many of the non-alcoholic beers on the market today, but you'll find that they are also low in calories. You can get really tasty ones. Prohibition is one of them, but there are others as well.