Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for coming today and spending some time with us and answering questions. I have two questions for you today. Let me set them both out and leave you to determine how to judge your response times.
The first has to do with the Mental Health Commission of Canada and mental health as an issue that we need to deal with. Of course, Minister, our job in the opposition is always to be critical, but when asked whether I can say something good about the government I always happily refer to the Mental Health Commission of Canada. It's accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time. It's put in place a national strategy, as you know, and has moved beyond that to do a lot more in terms of policy and best practices and training, and so on.
But the issue, Minister, as you know, is not going away. One in five Canadians is living with mental illness and it's costing our economy $50 billion a year, and it's anticipated that those costs are going to rise significantly as we move forward. It's time and the Mental Health Commission of Canada has asked to put in place a renewed mandate to turn their strategy into an action plan and extend the funding to support a new mandate for the Mental Health Commission of Canada. So my first question is this. Will your government do that, extend the mandate of the commission, and of course provide funding to support that mandate?
The second question has to do with food labelling. We know that chronic diseases are the leading cause of death and disability in Canada and are among the most costly but also preventable diseases. We know that part of that equation is an unhealthy diet and that they are in fact a public health risk to Canadians with 60% of adults suffering from obesity and nearly a third of kids. We know that Canadian diets do not meet national recommendations. We also know that your department has put forward some recommendations or proposals with respect to food labelling, but those proposals seem to have some glaring omissions to us.
First is that they continue to give, on the front of food packaging, priority to the marketing claims of the producer as opposed to nutritional information. Second, the labelling doesn't deal with added sugars, and we know that research is showing that excess sugar from added sugars can triple the risk of dying from heart disease. Lastly, we ought to have on those labels standardized serving sizes that actually reflect consumption, so that we don't have to reach for calculators to figure out what it is we're actually taking in.
Have your proposed changes to food labelling gone through, been approved, or are they outstanding? Depending on your answer to that, will you make some further changes to those proposals or why didn't you include these three issues in your proposals?