Health committee  I would just like to clarify my response, which is that I'm not against the child tax credit. I am concerned about ways it may be implemented and about what we can do just to make sure that it is equitable. One of the things I said in terms of evaluation to the committee when I

Health committee  And I'll also provide my slides and a written input.

Health committee  I'll be brief. In terms of stopping the gridlock, one of the things to do is to elevate the priority of this issue within government. I was on the World Health Organization expert committee for the development of the global strategy on diet, physical activity, and health. The

Health committee  Wow. I'll start, and hopefully I'll touch on a few of the points; you've raised quite a number. Then we can go across the panel. Yes, it is a daunting task ahead of us. I'd say it's taken us really fifty years on this track to engineer everything out of our lifestyles and to m

Health committee  I'll just comment on the tax credit, and we did address the committee as well. I'm quite concerned about it, because the way it's set up, people have to spend the money in advance and then get a refund for it through the credit system. To me, that means we're going to increase i

Health committee  The other point I wanted to make is that in Nova Scotia they have done an evaluation only on the finance portion, not on the participation level increase. They found that on their $150-tax credit, the average credit received by a family for that $150 was $17. I think it's a grea

Health committee  I would say they are quite willing in the sense that they worked with us when we were doing our municipal survey. Some of our questions were around land use policies because we are concerned about the environments in which people are living. We know that environments like the one

Health committee  I'm not saying that obesity isn't a problem. It is a huge problem, and I think we tell parents and educate parents about it. But my comments were solely around mass communications--ParticipAction-like campaigns that are 30 seconds long--that I'm concerned stigmatize children who

Health committee  Also, when you look at Saskatoon in Motion, you'll see it followed the principles of what has been shown to work. There is evidence that community-wide activities and campaigns work for adults. We have less for children, but they followed the same principles. It involved multipl

Health committee  Perhaps I could add to my earlier comment about not having an obesity campaign, particularly in social marketing. That was so we don't create a “blaming the victim” situation, because I really see this as a societal issue. As Mark was saying, many things have to work together to

Health committee  Perhaps I could try to address that. ParticipAction is internationally recognized as one of the most successful campaigns ever in the world. One of the reasons for that is even though they haven't run a campaign in the media, through television buys, for example, since the mid-1

Health committee  First of all, thank you very much for inviting us here to talk about this really important topic. I'm going to start with just a couple of words about our institute and then I'll be presenting data and some recommendations. The Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute h