Health Committee on May 7th, 2009

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, everyone. Your organizations do a lot to protect Canadians of all ages.

There are two areas I'd like to focus on. First, this labelling thing is getting a bit confusing. I'm hearing talk about the system in California. Has there been some peer review? How long has it been in operation? Is it having any impacts? I look at adding more and more, and I think there will come a time when people just won't pay any attention to the labels, period.

Can you help me with this labelling issue?

[Claire Checkland]

When I was younger and in school, home economics was still a class that you got to learn. They taught you how to do your laundry. They showed you different symbols of green, yellow, and red. Some things meant you were to hang-dry a garment, and so on. To this day I still remember it, and I actually didn't pay much attention in that class. I was more of a tomboy and was interested in other things.

Industry people and others definitely do talk about over-labelling sometimes. When we decided to make sure that language on products was in both French and English, it meant that it would take up a lot of room on a label, but we still do it because it's important. I would say the same if there's something in a product that causes cancer. I would be surprised if anybody could argue why we shouldn't find out about that or why we shouldn't find the space for it and educate people about what it means.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

If there are any peer-reviewed journals or articles, it would be great to see them.

Actually, I'm hoping to squeeze in two more quick questions.

Ringing in my ears is our local tobacco prevention coordinator for our area. She was always hugely important in terms of where our particular community was going in terms of knowledge and understanding. I'm not actually particularly convinced. We know that we have a framework, an act that tobacco is under. We know that our government is committed to looking at issues such as this one here, and I don't perceive that it's anything about lawsuits. I perceive that we have a regulation, and that is probably the appropriate place. If there are some gaps in that legislation, then that will be the appropriate place to deal with the gaps, rather than having previous products here and new products there.

Do you have a quick comment?

[Cynthia Callard]

Thank you very much for the opportunity to explain again, or more clearly, what a difference it would make.

The responsibilities on manufacturers under the Tobacco Act and those under the proposed Bill C-6 are vastly different.

Under the Tobacco Act, you can put anything on the market. There is no restriction. You just have to put a label on it. You have to meet the packaging requirements, you have to pay the tax on it, you have to test it, and you have to report it, but there's no pre-clearance or anything. Any product can go on the market. The result is that there's always post-market surveillance, which is exactly the problem that was explained to the committee earlier this week.

Under Bill C-6, manufacturers have a responsibility. They can't put something on the market if it's going to harm human health or safety. The effect of putting tobacco products under Bill C-6 would be that only tobacco products that are safe could go on the market. Are there safe tobacco products? Some people say yes; some people feel that some of the new tobacco gums or various other tobacco products can be ingested without too much difficulty. I think there's a good case to have those aspects explored. I think it's conceivable that there could be safe products.

The circumstance we have now is that by not putting it in this framework.... I should hasten to say that tobacco is a consumer product. The government admits it's a consumer product, and they've said in court that it's a consumer product, but the result of this is that tobacco manufacturers, as producers of a consumer product, don't have to meet that general obligation in Bill C-6 that I think is such an advance over previous existing law.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you for that.

Again, I have concerns. We have chemical management plans, and I'm not sure if it quite makes sense to put everything into this particular plan when we do have other mechanisms--

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

I'm sorry. Our time is over, Ms. McLeod.

Can I go to Monsieur Dufour?

[Nicolas Dufour, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thanks to the witnesses for being here today.

I would like to continue along the same lines as Ms. McLoed. You haven't had the time to answer certain questions on the Tobacco Act. Why did you choose to draw a distinction between products before January 1, 2009 and those after that date? Why did you not feel the need to include all tobacco products?

[Cynthia Callard]

This takes us back to the beginning of the Hazardous Products Act. In 1969 when it was brought in, another committee was going on at the same time, called the Isabelle committee. They were receiving all the information about the health hazards of smoking and they were trying to figure out what to do.

At that time it wouldn't have made sense to put tobacco in the Hazardous Products Act because people really didn't know what to think about it. The concern was that it was so dangerous it couldn't be made safe. So if you put all products under the Consumer Product Safety Act, then all tobacco sales would be illegal. For many decades, the health community has been strongly of the view that they don't want to make tobacco products illegal. Putting them underground is not the solution. The solution is to work within a legal system and encourage people to stop smoking.

Virtually all the people who smoke now started smoking after 1969, in fact a good number of them started smoking after the most recent Tobacco Act was passed in 1997, or the first Tobacco Act was passed in 1988.

Another historic example is that between 1986 and 1988, for two years, a committee just like this considered putting tobacco under the Hazardous Products Act and in fact decided to do so. That was Bill C-204. The government introduced another bill, called Bill C-51, which replaced it. In fact, it was written so that if one bill passed, the other one would die.

We've gone this route before of where to put it. We don't want to make tobacco products illegal, but we don't want to continue generation after generation.

So my proposal is that this is the moment we're going to cut the time. We're going to say yes, we'll live with that. People can continue to sell the ones they've got on the market. They can continue to be sold the way they're sold and be governed that way. But from this day forward, we won't have little novelties like a new pack, or a new brand that opens in a fancy way that are all trying to get people to try to use the products. We'll say there will be no more of that stuff. We're only going to live with yesterday's mistakes; we're not going to make more. We don't want to make it illegal, but we don't want to continue the problem.

This is the solution I am proposing to the committee as a way of using the opportunity of Bill C-6 to achieve justice in the manufacturing sector so that all consumer product manufacturers are treated the same at some point, and to achieve public health by reducing the amount of product-based tobacco promotion that will take place.

Thank you.

[Nicolas Dufour, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

That question has been asked a number of times since the start, but don't you think, still in the context of the fight against tobacco, that it would be better to give the present Tobacco Act more teeth than to include this part in Bill C-6? How could this help you in concrete terms? A little later earlier you talked about blocking certain new products that might be toxic. In Quebec, those products are already hidden; it's extremely difficult to advertise them. It is increasingly difficult for young people to obtain those products, despite the attempts by the tobacco companies to promote them. It's increasingly complicated for them. Don't you think that giving an anti-tobacco act more teeth would be more useful to you in fighting smoking?

[Cynthia Callard]

A stronger Tobacco Act is something I think we would all love to see. What we can tell you is that there's no inkling that there's one in development.

The current Tobacco Act falls short of our international obligations under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. It falls short of the measures in other countries. It falls short, I think, of health needs.

It's true that, mostly due to provincial actions, tobacco has been put under the counter, smoking has been removed from bars, and so forth. We've made great progress, and I don't want to deny that. But in many ways what has happened now is that the problem has gone underground. It's possible you've never seen the products I showed you today, and yet one-third of Canadian kids have smoked them. How can they be using products adults don't even see? It's because we're dealing with a new type of problem than we had before, and the old law is not adequate, in my view.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you so much, Ms. Callard.

We'll now go to Mr. Brown.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And thank you for the comments and examples. I've seen this before, and certainly it is why I think there is so much interest in trying to ban these. I think it's just a question of what the most efficient way to do that is. I certainly agree with your sentiments.

A few people have referenced Proposition 65. I have read that the Canadian Cancer Society or Environmental Defence could reference success where it has been used in California. Has there been any peer review of it, or any academic references that show support for the labelling?

[Aaron Freeman]

I can track down for you some of the research that has been done on Proposition 65. Proposition 65 was introduced in 1987, so this act has a long history. It has been around a long time. It hasn't been without controversy. It's fair to say that certain elements of the industry are not wild about it.

But I think it's been a very sensible approach, and it's been a very popular approach, because many of the chemicals that they deal with are problematic and they recognize that programs.... Your colleague mentioned the chemicals management plan, which we've been strongly supportive of and which is a good way to deal with priority chemicals that require in-depth assessment and a regulatory approach. The problem is that it only can deal with about 65 chemicals a year, and even then, it takes about five years to regulate those chemicals.

This is a much more proactive way of alerting consumers and giving them a choice around products that contain harmful chemicals, as a baseline, as a default. It's not to the exclusion of programs like the chemicals management plan, but it certainly would augment those programs and provide a much more proactive way to do it, with much more information provided to the consumer.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Are there any additional comments?

[Claire Checkland]

I think that was a pretty good summary. We all have aspects of Proposition 65 that we like and aspects that we don't like. The warning is actually not directly on the product where you can see it when you purchase the product. That's definitely of concern to the Canadian Cancer Society. In our case, the label we advocate would be something you can see when you purchase the product. That's all I would have to say.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

I guess what I'm pondering is if there's any information you come across that you could share on the effectiveness, in the sense that you see the labelling on cigarettes and clearly it's effective. But I wonder, when you get into chemicals, if it's a little too complicated to get the broad comprehension that you'd wish to have.

[Claire Checkland]

It's definitely a much more complicated thing for chemicals. On tobacco, the research since 1969 has caught up, and now everybody does understand that it's very cancer-causing and extremely risky, but there is research out there to show that different things are cancer-causing and so on.

As for research on its successes, one thing that it's definitely been very successful with is getting industry to change its practices, to substitute safer chemicals, and to at least reduce the use of the more toxic chemicals they use. There's definitely a lot of research about that in Europe. California has a lot of research, and Massachusetts does too, as do many other places.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Going back to the kids' products, are there any other things like this that might be of interest to the committee, or examples you've seen that are pretty blatant attempts to target kids?

[Cynthia Callard]

How about banana splits? These are actually designed not to smoke directly, but to use to smoke your marijuana joint. I'll open one and pass them around--

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

You're not going to demonstrate, are you?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

I was just checking.

[Cynthia Callard]

I'm not smoking. I'll pass it around to you. Who'd have thought? It's marketed for people to roll their joint in and smoke. The danger is that about the same number of people are--

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Pass it on, Mr. Dufour.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!