Thank you very much, and thank you for the testimony you've given today.
We've had a number of fairly wide-ranging conversations about different things, but for us as a committee, at the end of day, our mandate is to sit down and actually review the act in a clause-by-clause way to see if it meets the stated objectives or there need to be amendments.
In that regard, one area that we haven't really delved deeply into as a committee yet is this issue of packaging, branding, and promotion. I thought I would spend a bit of time on that with you. I think both the Public Health Agency of Canada and OPHA have proposed the plain packaging. I've certainly seen that for cigarettes, and it's worked very well in certain jurisdictions. I'm just not sure how you legislate it.
I am going to just quickly read what's here in the act around promotion and around branding. See if you think it's sufficient or if you have any advice for us as a committee to add more to it.
Under promotion—I'm going to shorten it a little bit, just to make it easier:
17(1)...it is prohibited to promote cannabis...
(a) by communicating information about its price or distribution;
(b) by doing so in a manner that there are reasonable grounds to believe could be appealing to young persons;
(c) by means of a testimonial or endorsement, however displayed or communicated;
(d) by means of the depiction of a person, character or animal, whether real or fictional; or
(e) by presenting it or any of its brand elements in a manner that...evokes a positive or negative emotion about...a way of life such as...glamour, recreation, excitement, vitality, risk, or daring.
Those are all the ways you can't promote.
Under branding, it says a person may promote cannabis by displaying a brand element, like Players versus—I don't even know what the brands of cigarettes are—either on the product or on a thing that is not the product, not cannabis,
17(6)...other than
(a) a thing that is associated with young persons;
(b) a thing that there are reasonable grounds to believe could be appealing to young persons; or
(c) a thing that is associated with a way of life such as one that includes glamour, recreation, excitement, vitality, risk, or daring.
Those are pretty clear limitations. It's sort of a name and maybe a colour, and in cigarettes there's not even colour used in plain packaging. Are those provisions sufficient, to your mind, around promotion and around branding, to strictly prohibit anything that would make this product appealing to young people? Are there any reactions to that?