Thank you, Mr. Chair, clerk, and committee members.
It is my pleasure to be here on behalf of Food and Consumer Products of Canada. We are the largest national industry association representing companies that manufacture and distribute food and consumer products in this country.
To capture a little bit about who we are, the members we represent today are companies that manufacture, I would imagine, about 75% to 80% of what you see in your neighbourhood grocery store. It is important to know that we are now the largest employer in the manufacturing sector in Canada as well, with some 300,000 jobs in both rural and urban Canada. I look around the table. There are probably about 1,000 jobs in your ridings collectively that are fueled by this industry.
I want to be clear that our companies take nutrition and health and wellness issues very seriously. The kits that were provided to you today show that we just launched in the last few days our health and wellness report, which is a report that we haven't done for a few years. It captures all of the reformulation efforts and initiatives that are going on in our communities and in our workplaces in terms of contributing to healthier products and healthy living.
We support Canada's Food Guide, and we promote it. We've been active partners working with Health Canada. I'm proud of what we've done in the areas of trans fat elimination, the work we are doing with the sodium working group with NGOs and government on sodium reduction, and what we have done recently on allergen labelling. I'm proud to say that our industry did not come knocking on the doors of government for an exemption on allergen labelling. We took our responsibility very seriously, we understood it was the right thing to do, and we supported the recent regulation.
Most recently we've been involved with Health Canada in a program. You might have seen commercials on TV and other information around the nutrition facts education campaign, which is really a campaign focused on trying to help Canadians to better understand how to read per cent daily value and use the nutrition facts table to make informed food choices.
This is a regulated table. It's a trusted source of information for Canadians, but admittedly, as many of the speakers have said, there is confusion around how to use it. There is an opportunity for us to work together in educating Canadians on how to use this tool, which has been in the market in Canada for about 9 or 10 years.
This table is on every packaged food product. As my colleague from the Dairy Farmers of Canada said, it allows Canadians to make the right decisions for themselves and their families. My mother is looking for more calcium. My father is looking for less fat. That makes the cheese purchase challenging in my parents' home. When we are looking for different things, we need to be very careful about simplistic labelling and drawing general conclusions.
The campaign we launched was back in November, as I mentioned. We have 33 participating member companies on board. We have the support of the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Dietitians of Canada, the Canadian Diabetes Association, and the Canadian Obesity Network. They are helping us promote this campaign to Canadians through their networks.
We heard a bit of talk today and at previous committee sessions around traffic-light labelling. In the kit I provided there are a few examples, the cheese example being one of them, which make a very simplistic conclusion from a very complex set of information. As was said by the Canadian Medical Association, it displays the levels of sugar, fat, saturated fat, and sodium, ranging from red to amber to green. It is problematic. The European Parliament recently voted against it. Australia has had some very active discussions and has decided not to go that route. In a lot of cases they have seen a customer see a red light on the front of a package and the person will think that the product should be avoided, and that is not necessarily the case. If we look to that traffic-light model as the panacea, as the alternative, as the magic bullet, we are all sadly mistaken.
In closing, I wanted to put that on the table and to restate our organization's commitment for even more education. We made a financial and a time commitment on this education campaign around the nutrition facts table. I will tell you that the CEOs on my board have said they were only investing in this if it was the first phase of a multiple-phase campaign that we could continue to build on going forward. Our commitment from industry is to work together with our partners in all different segments to continue to ensure that Canadians are making the best choices they can when they're shopping for groceries.
I will leave it there, and I'm happy to take any questions when we get to that portion of the discussion.
Thank you.