Mr. Speaker, I rise to support the motion presented to the House by the member of Parliament for Winnipeg North.
My hon. seat mate has asked us to support Motion M-217. It is worth conserving the words of this very thoughtful motion: "The government should seek to ensure that manufacturers of food and beverages be required to print best before and expiration dates clearly and legibly on the outside of product packaging in a non-encoded format".
What my hon. friend is saying here is that when we go shopping for food products we should easily be able to understand what we are buying and how long that product will be good.
What he is saying is that easy to understand packaging labels should be a right. Canadians are proud that we produce the highest quality food products in the world. We should have labelling standards of an equally high standard.
Today food and beverage manufacturers are only required to place best before dates on products with a shelf life of up to90 days. In fact, no shelf life standards exist and it is the manufacturer's decision to determine the appropriate shelf life period for its products and label them accordingly. That is just not good enough.
It shifts an unreasonable burden on to consumers to make the purchasing decisions with no fair basis for making these decisions.
It puts manufacturers with rigorous standards at a disadvantage. It does not meet the highest possible standards that Canadians expect of our food products.
It is really quite extraordinary that we require all kinds of nutritional information to be printed on food packages but we fail to say when the food was produced and how long it retains its quality.
According to the Grocer Products Manufacturers of Canada's own survey 97 per cent of Canadians are interested in knowing the shelf life of products. The current lack of standards is not meeting consumer demands and quite frankly I think most Canadians would be astounded to learn how lax our formal standards really are.
The Consumer Association of Canada supports the extension of date marking to all food.
What we need, as my hon. colleague pointed out, is basic information presented in a straightforward manner. We need easy to read, easy to locate labels on all foods to give consumers the facts they need to make informed decisions.
There are complicated encoded messages on products so that manufacturers can determine their sales figures and inventory information. Why should information not be provided to consumers so they can know vital information about the same food products? If it is good enough for manufacturers to know the information why is it not good enough for consumers?
As we move to produce environmentally friendly products surely we can move to produce consumer friendly labelling on the most essential of all our products, our food.
Knowledge is power and consumers do not have all the knowledge they need. We all know that more and more people are stocking up on many foodstuffs through bulk purchases. Indeed all major supermarkets are encouraging consumers to do so through advertising and marketing strategies. Consumers have a right to know how long those products are good for before they stock up these bulk purchases.
Another major trend in modern society is the move to foods purchased without packaging. We have all seen and used the bulk bins in our local groceries to scoop out bulk amounts of literally anything from soup to nuts.
Should there not be labels on these bins to tell consumers when the items were prepared and how long they retain their maximum quality? Should those foods not have some kind of durability date? Should products produced on totally different dates be mixed in the same bin? Surely what we need are some basic labels to give real meaning to the phrase health food.
This issue is not a philosophical debate; this is a completely practical matter. To see how modern our standards are, just last evening I walked through a local supermarket and examined the most primary foods to see which products had packaging dates and best-before labels. I do not want to name names or blame anyone. The problem is the lack of any uniform standards. While I was walking around last night I looked at the chicken and the hamburger packaging. They had labels which had both date packaged on the top and best-before written on the other corner. Somewhere between these two expressions was a date, but I had no idea what date it was: the date it was packaged or the best-before date. Not only that, the date that was on there was
yesterday's date. Were those goods packaged yesterday, or was this the date when they were no longer any good?
Since all the meat packaged in that area had yesterday's date on it, I had to assume that was the day they were packaged but maybe I assumed wrongly. Maybe if I had bought those things today they would be past their best date.
On the major canned food goods in the store that I walked around which families stock up on for emergencies, there was almost no best-before dates. There was one major exception: sardines packaged in New Brunswick had very clear labelling and I salute the manufacturers for that. Some jars of peanut butter had best-before labelling and some did not. Some jams said to refrigerate after opening and some did not. Frozen foods had no best-before labelling at all.
I might have made some errors and I might have omitted some products, but this was when I was casually walking through the store and arbitrarily picking products up and checking. I also had somebody check each one if I could not find it on the label. We both may have missed it, but we both tried to find the best-before dates. In fact walking around the store last night I noticed that no packaged foods had any information about how long the product retained its quality once the seal was broken.
I am not claiming that the standards I found are typical of all products or all grocery stores. I am saying that there is no way of knowing what to expect precisely, because we lack something as simple and as important as a expiry date and a best-before date on many foods and beverages. They should be marked clearly and legibly on the outside of product packaging.
I have heard the argument that if people do not like the labelling standards on food at their local supermarket they should just shop somewhere else. I am afraid that many senior citizens in my riding of Hamilton Mountain would find it extremely difficult travelling from supermarket to supermarket to find easy-to-understand packaging. We are not talking about standards for luxury items. We are talking about standards for food, the most essential of all the goods we package.
Canadians should be entitled to know when the food they eat was prepared and how long the food they purchase maintains its freshness. We need such basic information about the food we consume.
I commend the member of Parliament from Winnipeg North for presenting this important motion to the House of Commons and I support him fully.