Do you know what I would love to do? I would love to return to this committee when this food guide comes out, lay it out to you, and have you look at it and tell us whether or not you think we've done what needs to be done.
You say it's too late. In one sense, you're right. In 2007 we'll be here with the food guide. But there is always opportunity.
I can tell you, I go through the transcripts of what has happened here. From that, I'm going to say two things to you.
First, nobody you have heard from has seen where we have gone with this food guide. That's part of the process: you go out, you consult, you get the input, you evolve. You had the Nunavut food guide in your hand. One of the important things for you to know is that the very person who was involved in that is the person who Lori has working on the first nation and Inuit food guide.
We had a question on the multicultural evolutions to the food guide, or first nations, and the answer was that we don't have data. Let me tell you that the University of Toronto's Dr. George Beaton, who has been a rock in getting us started on this process and going through our protocols, said at the beginning that our first decision had to be whether we would look at creating new, de novo, food patterns, because if so--and when I say “new” food patterns, I mean based on the ethnic pattern that is followed, or the first nation and Inuit--we needed data. We needed data on what those people were eating or we couldn't do it.
So this is an imperfect solution when you come out with a food guide and you evolve it for a particular cultural group, because you're taking a food pattern developed for Canadians that's based on the food supply, what Canadians eat, their nutrient needs, and chronic disease prevention. You're asking those people who maybe have come from Thailand, who have a different pattern of eating, to face a pattern that was developed for the Canadian moment.
Somebody--I think it was Mr. Fletcher--made the suggestion that we have a link to all of these other food guides. I think it's a wonderful idea.
The Canadian food guide will be a food guide that is rooted in Canadian foods, in the traditional pattern that we have data on, because that's the only thing we can use. If we don't have data on what people are eating, we can't develop a de novo pattern.