Mr. Speaker, I will agree and disagree with the member for Ottawa Centre.
I am not sure that the only reason trans fats were used to prolong shelf life and to make products last longer was to improve profitability. The cookies on the shelf in my home last a long time and I want to know that they will last and still be safe to eat when I get to them. It is not just about profitability for the company. It is also in my interest that the product last longer.
It is our right to legislate what goes into foods. We have an obligation to make sure that food is safe in Canada. We have a whole series of regulations around product labelling. The former minister of health went a long way to making sure Canadians will be getting much more information to make informed choices. Sometimes our choices are not perfect. All of us have been on planes where we grab whatever snack food is offered. We have the ability to compare two snack foods on a flight and, while neither one of them is great, at least we can decide which one has fewer calories or less fat. We can make choices appropriate to our diets. That is one benefit alone of the information that we will get.
If members were to read the nutrition action letter, they would see that it has a lot of information about food and is helping to educate people. People are saying that Canada's labeling, vis-à-vis the United States, is much better. It took us longer maybe to get those little information boxes with the percentages of our vitamins, fat and protein quotients, but we are in fact getting better information than the U.S.
We have an obligation and a right to demand and legislate the information, and we have an opportunity as well to encourage. In terms of the regulation on packaging, a lot of companies are unhappy at having to change their packaging but they have to do that. It is our obligation and right to tell them what to do. I do not think everything is about leaving it up to market forces. I think market forces can push and get people a lot further along, but we need people to not just say they want these products but to actually purchase the products. There does have to be a level playing field to make sure that we are all working with the same information and that all the companies are working. We do that in a whole series of products that we regulate as a country, and so it makes perfect sense.
The question of course is the timing and the right levels. The whole issue of 2% per 100, maybe that is not the right measurement, so let us work with the science, advance the science, invest in the science, encourage it and make sure we are getting the right information. Maybe it is zero, in which case we have to get rid of it completely.