Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege for me to stand and comment on this legislation put forward by the hon. member for Mississauga South. He has worked very hard on this issue over a number of years. He has brought the issue before the House a number of times and it has reached the health committee a couple of times. I particularly want to refer to the last time it was before committee, when I had the opportunity to chair that committee and to see exactly what the merits of this piece of legislation might be.
I think it is important for us to understand that FASD is a very serious problem in this country and has to be dealt with in a very comprehensive way. FASD is not a simple thing. It devastates families. It devastates our health care system and our court system with regard to its major impact on the human costs as well as the health costs.
As we look at FASD, we can imagine how a parent feels who, because of the consumption of alcohol, has a child that is afflicted with this disease. Parents have terrible guilt knowing that they have negatively impacted and handicapped a child unintentionally through something that certainly could have been prevented.
We really need to get a handle on this problem through something that is a lot deeper than putting a label on a bottle of alcohol or dealing with it from that perspective. I will get into exactly why I believe this has to be much deeper and more aggressive than that.
I will illustrate this by suggesting that right now we are in a season when many Canadians go big game hunting. Anyone who has ever gone big game hunting knows that it is very easy to be led off the trail by seeing a rabbit track while tracking big game in the snow. I would suggest that this is what we are doing with this legislation here: if the hunter chases the rabbit track, he is still hunting, but he will miss the mark. He will miss what really needs to be done in looking after the needs of his family for that winter. I will get into that a little later.
I would suggest that this bill is a rabbit hunt rather than a big game hunt. I would suggest that this issue is much bigger than rabbits and has to be dealt with in a more comprehensive way, rather than putting a label on a bottle and thinking that we have dealt with the problem.
What I would say to the hon. member is that we must look at the evidence we looked at in the health committee as to whether putting a label on a bottle would actually work or not. We had many witnesses talk to us about the issues and about whether labelling would be substantive and would actually do the job or not. The fact of the matter is that a significant number of the witnesses, although it would not be quite fair to say most of them, suggested that putting labels on bottles of alcohol would not make any significant change in the behaviour of individuals with regard to whether they would drink or not drink while pregnant.
In fact, there are some statistics with regard to drinking alcohol that have come forward since this piece of legislation and a similar piece of legislation, which I think was Bill C-206, brought forward in 2005. Since the early 1990s, 90% of Canadians who drink have been aware that heavy alcohol consumption during pregnancy has a negative impact on the fetus. Since the 1990s, that number has gone up significantly. At the present time, according to the most recent information we have, 99% of Canadians know that drinking during pregnancy harms a fetus.
If we simply put a label on a bottle of alcohol to inform the public that it causes problems for the pregnant mother, it is not going to do more than what is already out there as far as information to that pregnant mother is concerned. The message has to be deeper and more aggressive.The solutions have to be more aggressive. The message for the mother must say that if there is the potential of being pregnant any amount of alcohol could potentially cause significant problems for the child.
The report of the Standing Committee on Health, which looked into this, was entitled in part, “Even One is Too Many”, suggesting that the message has to be more aggressive than just putting a label on a bottle that says if a woman is pregnant, drinking may harm the fetus. We have to make sure that the message goes much farther than that.
An individual from my riding who came to see me worked with women whose children were born with FASD. We had a long discussion about the situation, about the impact on these people, and about how we could deal with the problem in a much more aggressive way.
We have talked about a comprehensive program here and about what needs to be done. The hon. member who has moved forward this piece of legislation is suggesting that we just put on a label and that would initiate a comprehensive plan.
The individual who came to see me talked about her experiences in working with FASD children and their mothers. She suggested that the best way to combat this, based on her experience, is to make sure that if an individual has one child with FASD, she never has another child who is a victim of FASD, and that she be dealt with in as comprehensive a way as possible so that there is a support system that comes around that individual.
The issue is not just the person who goes partying on the weekend, drinks too much and is not aware of it. It is more about the binge drinking. It is on first nations reserves. It is in dysfunctional families, where individuals are addicted to this product and have no opportunity to have a support system around them to make sure they can deal with the problem at hand.
This individual who came to me is suggesting that if we really want a comprehensive plan we should work in conjunction with the provincial governments to deal with FASD and the delivery of health care systems in a comprehensive way. We should make sure that we do everything we possibly can to give support to those individuals so that FASD is not repeated.
When we looked at this piece of legislation, we also saw that putting a significant amount of money into putting on labels would have a negative impact on some of the small and medium sized brewers. It would take money away from where they have already designated it to deal with this issue. Putting a label on a bottle, which really does not accomplish the goal, would have a negative impact on their industry, on their businesses and on taxpayers.
I have a real concern about this. People might ask why we do not put a label on a bottle. They might ask what harm it would do. The harm it will do is that, as the government before this one has done with so many things, some think we can just go a little ways toward the right thing and that means actually accomplishing it. They chase the rabbit, even though they are big game hunting, and think that when they catch the rabbit everything is going to be fine.
That is an absolutely inappropriate way to look at this issue. This issue is much too serious for us to think that just putting a label on a bottle will solve the problem. In fact, when we were last in committee, the hon. member actually brought in bottles from the United States and a number of countries and showed the committee the labels on the bottles. The labels on those bottles were so small and so insignificant that one almost would have to bring out a magnifying glass to read them clearly. If one were in a poorly lit room and not seeing very well, or drinking at all, one would not be able to identify the label on the bottle or the significance of it.
Let us look at tobacco. We have very aggressive and abrasive labelling on tobacco packages. I am not so convinced, nor are the statistics convincing, that putting even those very aggressive and abrasive labels on cigarette packages is changing things. Really, what is changing cigarette smoking in this country is banning it from public areas and having so much peer pressure applied to the citizens of this country that it becomes unfashionable to smoke in the presence of other people, particularly children. We need to make sure in regard to FASD that drinking while having the potential of being pregnant is unfashionable as well.
I could go on about how this would negatively impact the industry for no good reason, but my time is just about up and I really want to say that we need to look at legislation that comes into this House and deals with the issue in an aggressive way. We need to deal with the issue in a way that does not just paper over what needs to be done, but actually does something that is aggressive and effective for the citizens of this country.
For that reason, I will not be supporting this piece of legislation. Although the intent of the hon. member is right and goes in the right direction, the bill does not deal with this issue in the way it needs to be done.