Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity today to rise in the House and speak in support of the excellent motion put forward by the NDP. It is well crafted and it provides a lot of substance. It provides very good direction to the government to come back within a year with legislation, if necessary, or regulation to ensure that we effectively eliminate trans fats in our foods where they are not naturally occurring.
The first thing I would like to do is thank our caucus member, the member for Winnipeg Centre, for the incredible amount of work he has done to get us to this point. His work is a testament to what a good Parliament can be and what the role of a private member can be.
We can be a pretty cynical lot in this place and we can do a lot of fighting. People watch that on TV during question period. People think that Parliament is about 45 minutes a day when we are going at it. That is part of what we do. It is about holding the government to account.
However, there is so much other work that takes place in the House, in committees and through private members' business as well. Particularly in this minority Parliament, Canadians have very good and high expectations about what will happen in this place.
Therefore, I am very proud that our member for Winnipeg Centre and the NDP caucus as a whole and our leader, the member for Toronto—Danforth, have worked on this issue to bring it forward. We want to be constructive. We want to ensure that we develop sound public policy. Anyone who does any research or investigation, even at a fairly superficial level, will know that the issue of trans fats is the single most important public health issue that we can address with no financial cost to Canadians.
How many hours have we debated and sometimes fought in the House over health care funding and the state of our health care system? How many times have we had debates and had differences over what we call the determinates of health, but more so around our health care system? Yet here is an issue where we can take some action, through public policy, to have a dramatic impact on the lives of all Canadians.
As has been said a number of times in the debate today, we are talking about saving the lives of approximately 1,000 Canadians who would otherwise die prematurely as a result of the prevalence of trans fats in our diet, in our consumer environment and in our society.
I would like to speak briefly about what this motion would do. It seeks is to commit the government to introducing legislation to ban trans fats by November 2005. First, it has a time line. It says within one year. We think that is very important. We want to ensure that progress is made on this issue and that it does not sit gathering dust on some shelf somewhere. Then everyone will say, “That was a good job, but that is the end of it”. We want to make progress on the issue.
The motion also commits the government to being guided by the Heart and Stroke Foundation findings, not the industry. It has done an incredible amount of work on the issue in a very objective scientific way, with consultations, including with industry and with other elements of the scientific community. We think the motion is very good because it builds on the work that has already been done.
The other thing the motion does is effectively bans processed or manufactured trans fats, not those that are naturally occurring.
We know, for example, that in Denmark trans fats have been limited to 2 grams of 100 grams of fat or of any oil or food product. The motion before us today effectively eliminates trans fats, except where they are naturally occurring. It is not possible for us to get to an absolute zero level because there are trans fats in things such as cheese and other products that are naturally occurring.
We want to aim at the processing that takes place, and that does not need to take place. Again, the member for Winnipeg Centre has given a very good history of how we got into trans fats in the first place and how it has taken years for there to be a public consciousness about what this stuff does to us and why it kills us.
I have a few facts about trans fats. There is no question that they are linked to health risks such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
Trans fats are in a wide range of food products, everything from cereal to baby food, cookies to french fries. Name it and trans fats appear to be there. They are the most prevalent in highly processed foods. The World Health Organization recommends that the daily intake of trans fats be zero, yet astoundingly they are found in 40% of the products on supermarket shelves. This is something I find to be really alarming. This really gets to the heart of the matter.
Issues have come up about choice. Why do we have to do anything? Does everybody not have a choice? Yes, theoretically we all have a choice about a whole bunch of things. However, the reality of daily life for most people, especially working families, and particularly people who live below the poverty line, people with low incomes who have very few economic choices, is they rely on convenience foods, processed and fast foods. People may not be aware of what it is they are actually ingesting.
Yes, there is stuff on labels, but has anyone ever tried to read those labels? People could spend double the time in the supermarket trying to read every jar, tin, plastic container and processed food. They could triple their time in supermarkets, the 7-Eleven or wherever trying to figure out from the tiny print on the labels what the heck it is they are buying. Even that may not be the full information because there is information to tell us that even when products indicate they are trans fat free, that may not necessarily be the case.
The issue of choice is an important argument to deal with. I would argue that the choice is there, but we have a responsibility as parliamentarians once we know that a very high risk exists to take some action based on sound scientific development and sound public policy. That is what the motion is about.
Living in this kind of consumer culture, more and more we are bombarded with messages and choices. How many different kinds of french fries or packaged food can people buy when they go to the supermarket? I actually believe that people want to make good choices. Parents do not want their kids to get sick. They do not want their kids to have high cholesterol. They want their kids to have a good diet.
In some communities people have very good choices. There may be organic food markets. The people who can pay what may be an extra cost at a local store like that have good choices before them, but that does not exist for everyone. We are talking about broad societal impacts and that is something we cannot ignore.
We should heed the work and recommendations of the World Health Organization which said earlier this year that governments should move to ban trans fats. That is exactly what we need to do. We need to show leadership in that area. Denmark has already done that and we need to do it as well to ensure that we are taking that kind of positive proactive action.
I hope the rest of the debate today is very positive and constructive. I hope that all members of the House will see that the motion is serious. It has real substance to it. It is about giving healthy choices to Canadians. It is about promoting the health of our families, which is something we should all support 100%.
