Thank you for the opportunity.
By way of introduction, we are an independent research institute specializing in work on alcohol and other substance use, measuring harms and evaluating interventions to reduce and prevent harm. We receive no funds from commercial vested interest groups.
One of the projects we're doing with the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction in Ottawa is a national overview of the harms from alcohol compared to other drugs. You will not have seen these data before. Nobody has. This report will be released early next month. It's about the economic costs of substance use in Canada.
We're showing you comparisons of alcohol-caused deaths; tobacco-caused; and deaths, hospitalizations, and productive years of life lost from all other psychoactive drugs, such as opioids, cannabis, and cocaine. The most recent year for which data is available is 2015. We have about 15,000 alcohol-attributable deaths, compared with some 48,000 from tobacco, and about 5,000 from all the other substances put together. The alcohol-attributable hospitalizations are getting up toward 90,000, compared with almost 140,000 for tobacco and barely 20,000 for other substances.
Because alcohol is harming people and killing them at a much younger age than tobacco, it is the leading cause of productive years of life lost, resulting in a tremendous loss of productivity to Canada each year.
The harm is increasing. I selected a couple of indicators relevant to one of the prompts for this inquiry, the tragic death of a young girl. I could have selected almost any indicator, but alcohol poisoning deaths have been increasing in recent years, as have hospitalizations.
I want to keep moving forward because time is so short.
The main point we want to make is that while sugar in drinks is encouraging some people to drink, alcohol cannot taste good, particularly to a young person. Caffeine in a drink will keep people drinking for longer and have people stay awake and be more likely to take risks, but alcohol is causing the harm.
We have a number of recommendations, 10 very specific recommendations that are evidence-based and focus on the alcohol side of what needs to be done policy-wise.
Recommendation number one is essentially limiting the sugar and caffeine content. Limiting the alcohol content is absolutely key. In the single-serve containers, it is not enough to limit just the size or the strength; you need to do both together. The most efficient way is to limit the number of standard drinks.
A standard drink, I'm sure you know by now, is a regular can of 5% beer or an average glass of wine or a shot of spirits. They contain roughly the same amount of alcohol. We recommend no more than 1.5 standard drinks be permitted in one of these containers.
There are a whole lot of recommendations on labelling we don't have time to go into.
These warning labels are being trialled in the Yukon at the moment. You may know that the cancer warning label was scrapped under pressure from alcohol industry groups in Canada. We have no time to go into that. We do recommend standard drink labelling and lower drinking guidelines.
I want particularly to get to excise taxes.
The next slide shows that we are recommending changing the name.
This is the one I really want to focus on. This slide is absolutely critical. It shows the rates of excise taxes per Canadian standard drink.
Beverages between 3% and 10%—I put that up to 12% but, you'll get the idea—are coolers, pre-mixed drinks. They are wine-based, malt-based, or spirit-based.
They each show that, up to 7% strength anyway, the excise tax per standard drink becomes less as beverages get stronger. This clearly shows a financial incentive for manufacturers to make high-strength products, for retailers to promote them, and for consumers to buy cheap high-strength beverages. There's a very perverse incentive here.
Above 7% for spirits, it flattens out. Now in malt-based drinks, you'll see that the decline continues. With a 10% malt-based cooler, the excise tax per standard drink is one-third that of spirit-based and about half that of wine-based.
Our recommendation is essentially to fix them all at the same level so that there are no perverse incentives to manufacture, promote, and sell high-strength drinks. Our excise taxes have created the conditions that made that 11.9%-strength, high-sugar-content product, FCKDUP—and forgive me for referring to it by name—cheap. The excise tax doesn't work and doesn't deter consumers from buying these drinks or manufacturers from making them.
Our recommendation is just to put an excise tax of 25¢ per standard drink across the board. That would apply regardless of the strength, so there's a consistent incentive for people to choose lower-strength, less risky products.
This brings me to our last recommendation. You may be aware that last week, after a six-year legal battle through the European, British, and Scottish courts, Scotland was able to introduce a minimum unit price. That's a minimum price of alcohol per standard drink. They got the idea from Canada, and they used much of our research to establish that minimum prices have a strong impact on alcohol-related harms. We've shown in B.C. that a 10% increase in average minimum price results in significantly reduced alcohol-related hospital admissions and deaths. It's actually reduced crimes, as well. We have a specific recommendation of a minimum standard drink nationally, which I could tell you more about.
Now, I know you think this is all for the provinces and territories, but there's absolutely no reason we couldn't follow Scotland's lead. Australia is looking to do this. The Republic of Ireland is looking to do it, as are other European countries. Canada could actually now learn from Scotland and introduce a national minimum price. This is one of the single most evidence-based strategies for reducing high-risk consumption.
Basically, I just want to summarize the points. Alcohol-related harm in Canada is substantial, and it's increasing. It greatly exceeds harms, on all measures, from all currently illicit drugs. The harm is mainly from the ethanol. There are feasible, evidence-based strategies to apply to the specific problem of high-sugar and high-alcohol drinks but also alcohol harms in general.
I really hope you will look at these recommendations seriously. I'm happy to give you more data and information if you require it.
Thank you.