Thank you, and good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
My name is Luke Harford. I am the president of Beer Canada, the national voice of beer. I appreciate the opportunity to appear here today to provide input into the committee's study on premixed drinks combining high alcohol, caffeine, and sugar content.
As members of the committee are aware, Health Canada, on March 23, 2018, issued “a notice of intent to amend the Food and Drug Regulations to restrict the amount of alcohol...in highly sweetened alcoholic beverages sold in...single-serve container[s]”. Beer Canada is working alongside Health Canada to assist through the consultation process and will be making a submission by the May 8 deadline.
My comments today are drawn from what at this point we plan to submit to Health Canada.
Health Canada's proposal, as outlined in the notice of intent, attempts to address products that we believe could have and should have been restricted—or even prohibited—under existing provincial policies and regulations. For example, one of the alcohol beverages that triggered the notice of intent was being advertised on billboards and in stores as having four drinks in one can. As my colleague at Spirits Canada mentioned, Quebec currently has laws in place that prohibit the advertising of alcoholic beverages that induces a person to consume alcoholic beverages in an irresponsible manner. I have copies of one of the displays on a bus shelter that was advertising the product in question.
The Government of Quebec has also taken additional action. As noted in the notice of intent, Quebec has announced proposed legislative changes to ban the sale of mixed malt-based products with more than 7% alcohol from private stores. The product I referenced earlier, which was being promoted as having four drinks in one can, had an alcohol concentration of 11.9%.
Health Canada has made it clear that it does not intend to propose regulations that would inadvertently capture liqueurs, dessert wines, and other sweet alcoholic beverages sold in resealable containers. We have looked at a variety of attributes that, when combined, will address Health Canada's goal of reducing the health and safety risks associated with high-alcohol, highly sweetened beverages sold in single-serve containers, without inadvertently capturing non-problematic products.
Beer is generally low in sugar and alcohol content. The sugars derived from malt and barley and other grains provide the energy source the yeasts use to create alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation. The low-sugar characteristic is one of the attributes that will be used to define beer objectively under the modern definition of beer, which the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is committed to bringing forward by an amendment to the food and drug regulations this spring. This is an amendment that we have been working on with the government since 2013 and we hope to see completed by the end of the year.
The amended definition of beer will stipulate a maximum sugar threshold of 4% by weight for products labelled, packaged, advertised, and sold as beer in Canada. The sugar content, or sweetness of a product, is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. There are products that fall under a regulated standard of identities, such as icewines and liqueurs, that have high levels of sweetness and that have been produced, marketed, and retailed responsibly for generations. Health Canada acknowledges this in its notice of intent by proposing to tie the alcohol strength restrictions to other attributes, such as container type.
We are suggesting that Health Canada could exclude most of these traditional products by restricting the amount of alcohol in products that are over a certain sweetness threshold and do not fall under a standard of identity in the food and drug regulations. Given these conditions, Health Canada's approach could be to restrict the amount of alcohol in non-standard alcoholic beverages over a certain sweetness threshold, and that are sold in a single-serve container, without unduly restricting non-standard beverages that do not promote over-consumption or appeal to youth. Health Canada has advised that the product that triggered the notice of intent contained approximately 10% sugar. It may make sense to establish an alcohol-restriction threshold at this level of sweetness.
Health Canada aims to restrict the amount of alcohol in highly sweetened alcoholic beverages sold in single-serve containers, and is therefore looking for input on what level to set the alcohol strength restriction to. There has been some indication that Health Canada may look at establishing the restriction based on the number of standard drinks in a single-serve container.
A standard drink is an academic concept, a mathematical construct based on a 341-millilitre bottle of beer at 5% alcohol by volume. Internationally, there is no common, standard drink definition. In Canada, it's 13.5 grams of alcohol. In Australia, it's 10 grams. In the U.K., it's eight grams, and in the U.S., it's 14 grams. In Japan, it's 20 grams.
It is a reference amount of alcohol that provides the foundation for low-risk drinking guidelines for education. It says nothing about how an alcoholic beverage is typically consumed, and it assumes that the alcohol in every alcoholic beverage is consumed in the same manner and digested at the same rate.
An alternative approach would be to restrict the amount of alcohol permitted in a single-serve container to a maximum of 30 grams of alcohol. For comparison, the product that triggered the notice of intent contained roughly 53 grams of alcohol, so 70% more. At a 30-gram maximum, the 568-millilitre container this product was sold in would have had 7% alcohol, not 11.9%. In combination with narrowing the focus to highly sweetened and non-standard alcoholic beverages, these regulations could identify the maximum alcohol content permitted by size of single-serve container—so a range of different container sizes.
There has been some discussion on applying the restrictions only to malt-based or grain-based products. Setting a restriction based on the source of alcohol will be insufficient. It will restrict innovation among responsible manufacturers while being easily circumvented by those that are not. Alcohol can be extracted from a fruit-based product in much the same way as it can be extracted from a grain-based product. Cider and wine are examples. Health Canada will find itself no further ahead by setting a restriction based on the source of alcohol in a product.
It is Beer Canada's opinion that the products that triggered the notice of intent are already addressed or would more appropriately be addressed under provincial policies and regulations. Highly sweetened products are not a problem in and of themselves. For this reason, Health Canada is looking to combine high-sweetness attributes with additional criteria when setting a restriction on alcohol strength. In addition to sweetness criteria, the regulations should apply only to non-standard alcoholic products. This will prevent the regulations from capturing icewines, liqueurs, and other such products.
Bringing together the attributes of an alcoholic beverage being highly sweetened—for example, 10% sugar content—non-standard, and packaged in a single-serve container, the regulations could restrict alcohol strength to a maximum of 30 grams per single-serve container. Beer Canada believes that these attributes in combination will help to achieve the regulatory objectives of Health Canada.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.