Members may know that Health Canada had put out a regulatory proposal—I don't remember exactly the date, but it was eight months ago, a year ago or so—and were out consulting on that proposal. That proposal laid out a series of proposed changes to food labelling, including providing more detail on sugar. For example requiring that sugars be grouped on the list of ingredients because some products might have various kinds of sugar, but they're not necessarily all labelled as sugar. They're all over the place in the ingredient listing, so the proposal was to group them all so you would see much more clearly the amount of sugar in the product. That proposal would have required more information on dyes and so on.
We consulted on that. Obviously we now have the comments from all the stakeholders. The government has made a series of new promises, commitments, for example, on added sugars and so on. The ministry is looking at the original labelling proposal that we consulted on and at the comments we've received, at the new commitments the government has made, and our aim would be, once the government has made some decisions, to go out with details on those proposals.
In terms of what we would be aiming to achieve—my colleagues I'm sure could talk about this as well—there's certainly lots of evidence that Canadians are consuming too much in the way of sugars. We obviously have concerns about issues such as obesity. Many Canadians are concerned about dyes and colourings, and whether those can produce reactions in sensitive individuals. The proposal is to provide more information to consumers about these features of their food so they're able to make more informed and better decisions.