I think there are some positive aspects of Bill C-45 arising from the task force report. For example, it looks as if the direction we're going in is that advertising for cannabis products will only be allowed in places frequented by adults. That would include cannabis retail outlets, perhaps alcohol retail outlets, gambling casinos, maybe in promotions before adult-rated films. There are a number of possibilities there.
I think that presumes that only young people are affected by advertising and marketing, and yes, absolutely we should be trying to do everything we can to prevent marketing advertising reaching young people. We're still not doing it with alcohol, for example. Alcohol advertising is everywhere you look these days, and there's no way of shielding young people from that.
Adults will still be exposed to advertising, and we should be very careful not to underestimate the power of that industry to influence behaviour. Remember, this is the industry which back in the 1960s convinced everybody that smoking these dried leaves in paper would make you more successful socially, and romantically, and career-wise without doing any harm to your health. Half the adult population bought it. I think we're more sophisticated these days than we were back then, and that will help, but adults are still very susceptible to advertising. Advertising works.
Public health has been making this statement for a long time now, and we see it's beginning to have an impact. We see prominent health journalists, André Picard, for example, writing about the way alcohol is so aggressively promoted and advertised. Even within the advertising industry, Terry O'Reilly is an icon in the Canadian advertising industry, and he was recently making some comments in his programs about the way in which alcohol is very aggressively targeted toward women. CAMH data shows that alcohol use among women is increasing just as it is among men.
This is why I proposed that we really do everything we can to completely ban advertising of all kinds. Plain packaging is very important. I'm glad to see that being talked about. With regard to retail outlets, one of the things I would like to see is a plain packaging approach to retail outlets as well, because of the principle that a pack of cannabis or whatever, as with cigarettes, is an ad. Every time somebody pulls it out, it's an ad. Plain packaging minimizes that to a significant degree, and I would like to see that same thinking applied to retail outlets as well.