When I was listening to the testimony in the last hour, I was reminded of what I remember, as I'm getting older, of the situation in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, when there wasn't political will to support tobacco control or clamp down on tobacco marketing. Health ministers were left kind of twisting in the wind, so they would latch on to what there was political will to do, which in those days was to educate young people. The results for public health were disastrous, because many people started smoking. It took decades to prove that these other systems--school-based programs and so forth--were ineffective, and a whole generation was lost.
It's ineffective and wrong-headed to put the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of young people to access information and use it properly. The responsibility should be on the shoulders of the adults in the system--the governments and the companies that have the responsibility to regulate and to be regulated. Let's be clear: the government can't Twitter or Facebook its way out of its regulatory responsibilities.
Focusing on youth is not a very good public health strategy, as 94% of smokers are over 20 years old and four out of five smokers are over 24 years old. Adult smokers are the ones looking to quit who need information and help. They deserve to have renewal as well.
Reference was made that 21,000 kids, due to the drug strategy, are latching on to Facebook. Well, that's less than 1% of Canadians between 12 and 19 years old. Health Canada doesn't have a good track record in reaching young Canadians. There's no research basis for suspending proven methods to go to an undeveloped, unresearched, unknown quantity. I think I heard reference to the fact that they might even want to abandon the work they developed over the years and take time to rework images and text. That would result in a delay of three or four years before we'd be in a position....
There are many ways of saying no, and I think today we are being told “not yet”, and we'll wait one more year, two more years, or three more years before the department is ready to come forward with something. But we know they're actually ready to go now, because they shared things with us last year. What they shared with us last year are not things that were tabled in the committee and they are not available in the public archives.
Delaying to use social media will not protect youth; it will harm youth, because it will delay putting on package warnings. Health Canada did pioneering research. They took the existing warnings and moved them from 50% to 75% to 90% to 100% of the package. These were familiar warnings. They found that just increasing the size made young people and young adults say they were more likely to reduce tobacco use. They were better at communicating the health effects of smoking, and they increased the number of people who disapproved of smoking—and that goes back to the social networking. They discouraged people from starting to smoke and increased the number of people who quit smoking. They also found that plain packaging was an equally effective way with young people.
So the government knows what to do. They know they should increase the size of the warnings and take the branding off. Other research recently published from New Zealand with young adult smokers shows exactly the same thing.
I think there are two issues at play here. One is the health warnings—why they were delayed and what should happen now. But the other is perhaps a bigger issue: the integrity of the health regulation and the protection of public health and safety from commercial interference.
The problems, at least until last year, were not with Health Canada. They did a very good job of consulting with us and others and doing the research. There were delays. This work was done under five health ministers between 2003 and 2005. Much of the research had to be suspended during election periods, when they couldn't do public opinion research. But they soldiered on in an excellent way. I may have had some frustrations, but I had no major complaints about the way the file was treated then. But something happened after this file left Health Canada, and that has been our challenge.
Health Canada manages the development of regulations for many other products in addition to tobacco: therapeutic drugs and devices, foods, pesticides, cosmetics, consumer products, and others. What happens when Health Canada scientists recommend a regulatory action and it's overruled outside of Health Canada? This should be a major concern to the committee, and it should be a major concern to parliamentarians and all Canadians.
In many ways this file exposes the vulnerability of the health protection system to commercial pressure. We urge you to support the government to protect health and accelerate the implementation of the warnings that have been developed.
Thank you.
