Mr. Speaker, I would like to address the House in terms of an experience that I had shortly after I moved into the Kelowna area of British Columbia.
Within three months of moving into the area, a serious accident occurred involving a gentleman under the influence of alcohol. He drove his car through a red light on a main highway and killed a beautiful young lady who was a college student and doing exceptionally good work. She was a bright young lady and beautiful to behold. She had tremendous marks during her second year in university and it seemed like she had a major professional career before her.
She was killed by someone who had consumed alcohol in an irresponsible manner. The man who drank that excessive amount of alcohol knew the effects of alcohol. He had been told about them many times. In fact, he had been incarcerated from time to time because he had been drinking while driving and doing other things he should not have been doing. He knew what the difficulties were. I am quite sure labelling would not have made any difference to this man.
I want to refer to another case. Driving in a traffic circle and on her way home, a teacher was hit broadside by a person under the influence of alcohol. She is now in a wheelchair. She had a successful career and was an excellent counsellor. Both teachers and students went to her for advice. Even though she has a physical disability now, caused by someone who used alcohol irresponsibly, she is still an effective person.
My wife was a kindergarten teacher who has since retired. She saw the evidence of fetal alcohol syndrome many times. She was sad about the fact that young women would consume alcohol while they were bearing a child.
One could argue that there is absolutely nothing good about the fact that alcohol is being consumed in the world. That is not the issue however. The issue is the excessiveness and the irresponsible use of alcohol by certain individuals.
All of the speakers so far this morning have not referred at all to the other part of this issue which is the health benefit of drinking wine. Science has documented very clearly that responsible and moderate consumption of wine, particularly red wine, has significant health benefits, including decreasing bad cholesterol, raising good cholesterol, and contains anti-oxidant cancer fighting properties.
If we were to label wine bottles in the same way as we label other alcoholic beverages, and there is no distinction made in Bill C-206, then we should tell the world as well that there are some benefits in drinking certain kinds of alcoholic beverages. Moderate and responsible consumption of wine has been linked with helping to guard against coronary heart disease and prostate cancer.
I must presume that the premise of the bill is to educate the public. If that is the case, then I suggest that labelling would not be the best educative tool that we could find in the world. There are many ways to educate young people and adults. There are many ways to appeal to the responsibility of adults.
The other day I was in the presence of a group of young people in a pub. Some of them were consuming too much alcohol, but they had identified one of their group to be the designated driver. They knew they were going to be driven by a person who was not under the influence of alcohol. These young people would have been judged impaired, but they were going to be the passengers in the vehicle, not the ones driving.
We need to educate our young people. I was so proud the other day of a group of young ladies, some of whom were pregnant, and they would not touch one drop of liquor. They were very responsible. They knew exactly what the implications were. None of those people needed to have a label on a bottle and here we are making absolutely no distinction between one kind of consumption and another kind of consumption, as if it is all bad.
It is the universality of this, almost as if any rule could affect absolutely every situation. This is illogical. It does not square with the facts and there is no truth to the matter that doing this would in fact decrease the consumption of alcohol.
I want to refer back again to the American experience in this regard. In 1989, the following label was put on alcoholic beverage bottles:
Government Warning: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risks of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery and may cause health problems.
I agree. There is no difficulty with that at all. I have a tremendous aversion to the excessive consumption of alcohol.
However, to suggest that this is going to prevent drinking is a very long stretch because here is what happened. Between the years 1989 and 1993, the number of women who reported drinking while pregnant in the United States increased. Four years of experience looked at this and did the labelling do anything to solve the problem? It did not. Therefore, why do we not focus on educating young people and ensure that they understand what the implications are? We can do anything we want with the knowledge that is around this.
The person who invented dynamite never, ever understood that it was going to be used to destroy other people. But we have that knowledge. We can do with that knowledge what we will. We can do good with it or we can do bad with it. We can misuse it and be bad or we can use it for benefit. Look at what dynamite has done. It has done tremendously good things in our society. It has helped construction everywhere.
Therefore, let us not take one rule and simplify it in such a way that suddenly it is going to solve all our health problems, that we will solve the excessive and irresponsible use of alcohol and that it will be done by labelling a bottle to say that this could cause trouble. It will not work.