Mr. Cash.
Evidence of meeting #19 for Health in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was foods.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #19 for Health in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was foods.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:55 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta
To the first point about the cost of eating healthy, we did some work in Edmonton. We went around and did calorie pricing of food items. We were particularly concerned and were motivated by the question, if you really were on a very tight budget and you first had to meet your basic energy needs before you could start worrying about nutritional concerns, what does the food landscape look like? We found that the energy cost of food varied by almost a hundredfold. If you were willing to eat a pile of sugar, you could meet your basic energy needs for under $1 a day, whereas if you insisted on trying to eat lean meat, such as turkey slices, you'd be spending $80 or $90 a day to get the same amount of energy.
These are very real tensions, very large differences that exist today in the relative prices of food when looked at by energy content, and that was not including luxury foods particularly.
On the second point...perhaps you could remind me.
4:55 p.m.
Conservative
Patricia Davidson Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
The sweetened soft drinks and sugared drinks and those sweeteners.
4:55 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta
The sweetened soft drinks and, more generally, drinking diet soda instead, we do have to be careful that in our push for nutritional choices we don't inadvertently raise other health concerns. If there are other health concerns, perhaps from exposure to certain additives that might be used to replace sweeteners, we would need to take that into consideration when the we think about what we're taxing and what people are likely to substitute toward.
4:55 p.m.
National Coordinator, Centre for Science in the Public Interest
I'd like to add a couple of points to that.
There's a real poverty in analysis around this issue of food taxing that I think has been created by some reporters who provocatively refer to this idea of junk food taxes or fat taxes. I think the Canadian Medical Association put it right in their testimony to the finance committee last week when they talked about, as we talk about, examining goods and services tax rules to make sure they reflect healthy eating.
A question you might ask the finance officials or ask your constituents is whether they think it's a good idea that we tax salads at the grocery store and in the restaurants. Is that a good idea? Is that promoting good health? There may be some convoluted way of imagining that it is, but quite simply, I can't see it.
If I may comment on what Mr. Trueman from the Department of Finance said about waiting for education to work, well, I'm a big believer in education, but we have to realize that, as I said earlier, these are real dollars that we're losing in diet-related diseases. They're real lives that are ending prematurely--tens of thousands a year, billions of dollars a year. We know that education is not a complete cure, but it works to some extent, and if we can do other things to assist it, such as stopping the taxing of fruits and vegetables, I think it is incumbent on us to do it.
4:55 p.m.
Bloc
Christiane Gagnon Bloc Québec, QC
Thank you for your comments and for your studies on obesity. We need to adopt a different attitude in order to tackle the issue of junk food properly. Several of you have given us different opinions on whether to use incentives or disincentives. The government will have to choose between a credit or a special junk food tax.
This is an area that requires several initiatives, including education, which has not been discussed much. In my opinion, we need participation at many levels, including the parents, social circle and the educational sector.
Mr. Clark made an important point. We need to use several kinds of social programs in order to better support the most underprivileged families because social class is also an important factor in obesity. That does not mean that there is no obesity amongst people who earn more, however they perhaps have more means to help themselves when they want to take control of their lives.
Obesity is not only a federal government problem but also a provincial one. Provinces must take steps to intervene amongst children in schools and to better assist families through social programs.
You mentioned that any initiative taken to tackle the problem of obesity are important, including the Canadian social transfer and the tax system. We seem to be moving away from the issue, but after having considered the matter of obesity, the government, through its legislative framework, will indicate which direction to follow or what to think about in terms of ways of tackling obesity.
Mr. Clark is the one who spoke about the problem in terms of social programs. For example, poor families would have more money to feed themselves and to clothe themselves if there were more social housing. We know that people who have less money are especially affected by these problems.
A no-smoking campaign was undertaken and it was successful. Do you think that campaign could be an example which might help us find solutions, in terms of the steps taken to tackle smoking, its impact on people's quality of life, the risk of lung cancer, etc. Even though many continue to smoke, people now have a greater fear of smoking, because they know more about its effects.
Eating habits are also difficult to change. We all eat junk food, chips, for example. Some people have told me that when they open a big bag of chips they have to get right to the bottom of the bag.
Do you think that the successful anti-tobacco campaign could serve as an example to plan a junk-food awareness campaign?
5 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rob Merrifield
Thank you. That's a true confession on the large chips, but we have a very short time so we'll ask for a quick answer.
5 p.m.
Associate Professor of Economics, Department of Business and Social Sciences, Nova Scotia Agricultural College
Anything we can do to help consumers make better health choices is a good thing. Education is an important part of that.
I'm not a sociologist; I spend time talking about economics. But my idea is that consumers have to buy a lot of stuff. They have to rush home and make meals. We need to understand that there are a lot of things they have to do, and they have to make healthy choices along with a lot of other choices when they have meals.
A meal is more than just nutrition. It is also a social event; it's getting together with the family, and that kind of thing. The person who makes the meal has to understand that those other things are going on as well. Anything we can do to help them make better choices and quicker, more efficient choices when they search for this healthy meal is appropriate.
Income is really important. We can eat chips, but there is no reason why those chips have to be high-fat, unhealthy chips. I don't see why we can't make healthy chips. In fact, if you go to a health food store you can maybe find healthy chips. So just because they're chips doesn't mean they have to be unhealthy, if you see what I mean.
5 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rob Merrifield
Aspartame chips--there we go, but no trans fats, for sure.
Do you want to comment very quickly on it?
5 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta
A lot of things we've looked at here we did successfully with tobacco; however, tobacco is a rather cohesive product. Tobacco is tobacco, and it was relatively easy to target what you meant by tobacco products.
Here we have a lot more difficulty. Certainly with taxation, education information, and product labels, all these things are more difficult because of the very nature of food items.
5:05 p.m.
National Coordinator, Centre for Science in the Public Interest
There's definitely a good opportunity to do some mass public education on this. There's evidence to demonstrate that it would be very effective.
On the poverty issue, it was recognized by Dalton McGuinty a couple of years ago that if we don't deal with the rising rates of obesity and the aging baby boomers, by 2015 the Government of Ontario will only have enough budget for one department, the Department of Health. and nothing else. So it's something to keep in mind.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Harold Albrecht Conservative Kitchener—Conestoga, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I apologize for not having been here for the presentation, so if my questions reveal that I missed something, let me know.
I notice that the Library of Parliament research refers to some examples from Norway, the U.K., and some provincial jurisdictions that have instituted a fruit and vegetable program. You said you don't have any examples or facts on how a disincentive or incentive would affect Canadian intake. Do we have examples from other jurisdictions on what the impact has been there, either in terms of GST, disincentives, or incentives, for these kinds of fruit and vegetable programs? Does anyone have any input on that?
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta
I was involved in a study that tried to simulate what impact fruit and vegetable price subsidies would have in the United States. We found that you could save 10,000 lives, due to prevention of strokes and heart attacks alone, with a relatively small 1% subsidy across the board on all fruits and vegetables. The idea was that you would only be inducing small changes in behaviour, but those changes over time would reduce risk.
It is difficult to look at what other jurisdictions have done and the impact on fruit and vegetable consumption, because we actually know very little about what people eat. When we try to find out what people eat, we end up doing things like dietary recall studies. They let us get at individuals or households, but are subject to what people think the interviewer wants to hear, or how well they can remember what they ate in the last 24 hours.
When we start looking at broader scales, we rely on things that agricultural economists call disappearance data, where we impute what people must have eaten based on what was produced, exported, or known to have been destroyed.
It's kind of hard to get at these population-level effects of what would happen, because we don't always know very well what does happen. Certainly anything the members of this body could do to encourage our data-collecting agencies to keep an eye out for that in their existing things would be very welcome.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Harold Albrecht Conservative Kitchener—Conestoga, ON
I thought I heard an inference from one of the responses that there was a fairly negative impact of aspartame in soda pop. Do we have actual evidence for that? What kind of light can you bring to bear on that topic? Not only are we dealing with obesity—and I know that's the focus of this study—it's also a huge contributor to dental caries. Could you comment on that?
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta
I was responding to a particular example that had been raised in questioning. I don't actually have any evidence regarding whether any particular additive would cause harm or not. My general point, though, was that nutrition isn't the only thing we care about in health, and that we could pursue nutritional goals and thereby accidentally exacerbate problems in other areas of health.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rob Merrifield
Let me intervene on that question. We have future panels that will deal with that issue. I think it's a very good question; it's just that the expertise is coming to the committee at another time.
Thank you very much.
We'll now move on to Ms. Keeper.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
Tina Keeper Liberal Churchill, MB
I'd like to thank everybody for their presentations. These have been excellent presentations today.
I would like to ask a little bit about something Mr. Cash mentioned. One thing that occurs to me is that on the level of economics, as Mr. Jeffery mentioned, the impact of not finding solutions or not finding strategies that are going to have some impact is going to be to have devastating economic impacts later.
One of the pieces of information we've received over and over again is that there seems to be a correlation between the rise in obesity levels in Canada and the rise in chronic disease. This seems to me to be something that really requires our attention.
We talked about the anti-tobacco strategy. That's one product, but when we look at its effectiveness—and I know people will say, well, that started 40 years ago.... I think we need to look at what works in particular strategies. I think that was a multi-pronged strategy that has been very effective in Canada.
I have two questions. One is on taxation, because cigarettes and tobacco are heavily taxed. Did you actually participate in that strategy with Health Canada? Was that part of the strategy? Where did the taxation of tobacco come from?
I also have a second question to Mr. Cash. I would like to ask you to provide a bit more information about the food subsidy program you talked about that you looked at in the U.S.
Could we go to this taxation question first?
5:10 p.m.
Chief, Sales Tax Division, Tax Policy Branch, Department of Finance
Yes. I worked for several years on tobacco taxation. That element is a very key part of the anti-tobacco strategy to discourage smoking through education, through health warnings, through regulating the marketplace, and through taxation to ensure a high price. I think one of the key things about tobacco is that it's a product of an addictive nature, where there's a very clear-cut goal of trying to reduce consumption to the greatest extent possible, and so of pursuing a particular strategy.
The flip side of it, of course, is that there have been contraband pressures from time to time. When the price of tobacco products rises to a certain point that the market will no longer bear, we see contraband pressures come in because of the addictive nature of tobacco and because people want to continue to smoke. It's an interesting case study, but it is a good example of price point analysis.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Tina Keeper Liberal Churchill, MB
There seems to be reticence here today on behalf of the tax policy branch to discuss taxation of food. What we've heard over and over again here is that the obesity levels are rising drastically, and because of the information being quite current, it has become a crisis issue.
5:10 p.m.
Chief, Sales Tax Division, Tax Policy Branch, Department of Finance
One of the things we tried to give a sense of in our presentation is not only the actions that have been taken to date but also the fact that in looking at taxation instruments there is a broad array of factors we have to consider, and also that taxation is just one of many tools that are available to the government.
As I said before, the tax system is a powerful instrument. Imposing a tax on something is taking money out of someone's pocket. We have to be very cautious of distributional impacts, particularly when we're talking about food. In looking at any proposal that comes along, we really want to ensure that we have an integrated strategy that addresses education about making healthy choices, labelling that allows consumers to make those choices, incentives for activity.
Again, drawing lines around particular food groups is also very difficult. What do you do with a dozen eggs? If you go home and make a six-egg omelette, that is not a healthy snack.