Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the invitation to appear before the committee. The Centre for Science in the Public Interest is a non-profit consumer health advocacy organization, specializing in nutrition issues, with offices in Ottawa and Washington, D.C. Our health advoca

Health committee  My impression is that Canada's Food Guide is still under development, but the last version I saw in March or April of this year didn't impress me. The science is pretty clear about the basic message concerning diet-related disease. Most Canadians should consume fewer calories;

Health committee  The panel consisted of 12 people: four of them either consulted for or worked for the food industry; four were public health nutritionists from very small communities--two of them with less than 15,000 people--and they had busy full-time jobs. They didn't come from organizations

Health committee  I can start.

Health committee  I think this is coming up to the fourth year that we have made submissions to the House of Commons finance committee with regard to reforming GST. Simply put, our recommendation is that the Department of Finance, in conjunction with Health Canada, look at the definition of basic

Health committee  I can address that question. You're quite correct, we are already making distinctions in the GST rules as they are. With regard to your side point, I guess, about the nanny state, in this particular context we're talking about children. Children have nannies, and that's probabl

Health committee  First of all, I should say that my impression is that the new nutrition facts labels are much easier to read than the voluntary ones that preceded them. The text is easier to see and the information is reported in a way that's easier to understand. That said, they could be even e

Health committee  I'd like to add a couple of points to that. There's a real poverty in analysis around this issue of food taxing that I think has been created by some reporters who provocatively refer to this idea of junk food taxes or fat taxes. I think the Canadian Medical Association put it r

Health committee  There's definitely a good opportunity to do some mass public education on this. There's evidence to demonstrate that it would be very effective. On the poverty issue, it was recognized by Dalton McGuinty a couple of years ago that if we don't deal with the rising rates of obesit

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the invitation to appear before the committee. The Centre for Science in the Public Interest is a non-profit consumer health advocacy organization specializing in nutrition issues, with offices in Ottawa and Washington, D.C. Our Ottawa hea

Finance committee  Two weeks ago the Canadian Medical Association recommended to this committee that it explore similar measures.

Finance committee  I appreciate that. I will resume where I was in the interest of more time for questions and answers. Our recommendations involve both taxation and tax relief depending on the nutrient profiles of food. The federal government currently collects about $2 billion in tax revenue fr

Finance committee  Absolutely. My impression is that one of the reasons we have a lot of these types of vending machines in schools now is because there were some cutbacks on funding to provincial education programs. But I think there is some evidence to indicate that even switching to vending mach

Finance committee  Certainly the sales tax should be reviewed with the idea of ensuring that the nutrition advice the Government of Canada is giving to people, and the aspirations of Canadians—for instance, that our kids read more, or that we purchase things that are absolutely essentials, whether

Finance committee  Well, there is, and in the footnotes I've cited the relevant provisions of the Excise Tax Act. I'm sure you're aware that if you eat a restaurant meal, regardless of what the food is, you pay, in most provinces, 14% tax, federal and provincial. If you buy a fruit or vegetable tr