Madam Speaker, I want to begin by thanking my colleague from Scarborough Southwest for this thoughtful bill. The bill is to amend the Food and Drugs Act, food labelling. Specifically, it would do some of the things I think all of us would like to see done.
A little later on I will go into some of the problems of the bill because there are always problems with any legislation initiated in the House, whether a government bill or a private member's bill. We are here to intelligently debate the bill, to point out some of the flaws and deficiencies and also to support the bill. What the member is attempting to do would be very difficult to argue against.
There are a few things the member is attempting to do with the bill.
First, the bill would require large chain restaurants to post the number of calories in menu items beside the corresponding price on menu boards, and, where menus are used, also the amounts of saturated fat plus trans fat and sodium per serving.
Second, it would require that full nutritional information on all fresh meat, poultry and seafood, not just ground meat, sold in retail stores be disclosed. This nutrition information already is required for most other foods by new regulations finalized January 1, 2003.
Third, the bill would require that prepackaged multi-ingredient foods show the percentage by weight of key ingredients, especially those relevant to health such as added sugar, fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
The member has tremendous support across the country for this and I just want to list some of the supporters. It is basically a partial list of supporters for this initiative. They include: National Pensioners' and Senior Citizens' Federation; Community Nutritionists Council of British Columbia; the Ontario Society of Nutrition Professionals in Public Health; the Canadian Women's Health Network; the Toronto Food Policy Council; the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology; the National Eating Disorder Information Centre; the National Retired Workers' Advocacy Council, and so on. I also received a letter also from the Centre for Science in the Public Interest.
There is clearly support for this type of legislation. This is an interesting day for this to be debated in the House. I would mention to the hon. member for Scarborough Southwest that I just left a committee meeting where the witness was Mr. Roy Romanow, former premier and author of the Romanow report, which we debated in this House and the government responded to not too many weeks ago in terms of an accord for the provinces, the funding issues and generally I guess the state of health care in Canada.
Today in questions and answers one of the questions put to Mr. Romanow by another member had to do with healthy living and the benefits that were derived in our society with healthy living. He came under slight criticism for not addressing that as much as the member thought he should have in his report to Parliament, which was tabled in the House in November.
I guess the point the member is trying to make is there is a huge cost in our society for not maintaining a standard of healthy living. A lot of that has to do with lack of exercise, but more important not knowing what we are eating.
This gets back to the member's bill which we are discussing now. In relation to that is the cost. This point was brought across today in health committee when we were speaking to Mr. Romanow. These were some of the numbers that were used. The cost of dietary related disease is $6.3 billion in health care spending and lost productivity every year in Canada.
If unchecked, these costs will likely increase substantially in the coming years as a result of rising pharmaceutical drug costs, the rising rates of obesity and the aging baby boomer population, which includes at least myself and possibly the member for Scarborough Southwest. We are talking about dollars but dollars do not tell us the whole thing. There is a human cost. As many as 25,000 deaths annually in Canada are due to cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes, and that number is growing as the population continues to age.
Those are the types of things that have to be considered when we look at a bill like this. The point that we have to speak on is the cost to industry. There is a way that we can get around this. Some of the ideas can be fleshed out at committee. I support moving the bill to the next stage so we can flesh out some of the details that could make a bill like this a reality.
I will quote from a letter I received yesterday from the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association. This letter was signed by Joyce Reynolds, the Senior Vice President of Government Affairs. In the third paragraph the letter says:
This simplistic proposal would be highly impractical and unworkable for food service operators. It would effect food served in a wide variety of settings including full service restaurants, quick service restaurants, hotel dining and banquet rooms, catered functions in institutional cafeterias, schools, clubs, hospitals, airplanes, trains and boats.
They are all in there.
The letter then goes on to talk about the multitude of choices that are available in a restaurant and the problems in attempting to comply with the bill if those multitude of choices had to be considered in adapting the restaurant industry to fit the details of the bill.
There are some problems. I do not want to read this letter in its entirety because it becomes a bit mind boggling. However it goes on to say:
The multitude of choices available to customers ordering a simple sandwich, illustrates the complexity of mandatory menu labelling. The make-up of a sandwich consisting of just five items or toppings (such as bread, meat, cheese, lettuce, and tomato) can be ordered in 120 ways. A sub comprised of 10 items or toppings could provide 3,628,800 combinations. When the items for a sub are expanded to 15, then 1.3 trillion combinations are possible...
In other words, she is trying to say that it is virtually impossible to communicate that kind of information to the consumer.
In all practical terms there is a way this can be overcome. I want to be as generous as I can. This is something we have to consider. We are concerned with the health of Canadians. They have a right to know what they are eating. It would serve the purposes of a lot of people in Canada if we could find a way to adopt this legislation. Details have to be fleshed out in committee. We support moving Bill C-398 on to the next logical step.