Health committee  Fundamentally, what you're saying nobody here would disagree with. However, it needs to be balanced with what industry is capable of delivering and what else is already out there to make sure that we are not duplicating efforts.

Health committee  Fundamentally, we agree in principle with this bill. And we do believe we need to do more to protect consumers when it comes to product safety. Whether labelling is the best way to do that is what I question. That's what I've been suggesting as we went through the process, and I

Health committee  For me, it's whether labelling is really going to get them to understand what the problems are with the product. I'm not going to talk about employees right now, because there's a whole other set of rules around employees. But when it comes to the consumer side of things, I quest

Health committee  It's a tough question to answer. I'm not an expert on all these toxic chemicals, but I do believe that most Canadians probably are not even looking that closely at the packaging. I think there are other ways we can get that information out to them.

Health committee  Absolutely. I think we're already noting here that there are lots of other regulations out there, even federally, with CEPA 1999 and the chemicals management plan, but also provincially. So we need to make sure that we're not duplicating efforts, that we're not asking them to do

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  It was certainly one of our comments in the letter that you'll see we sent to the minister back in April, and it continues to be. But that's where I lean on folks like Ralph, who are specific to industries that have those types of regulations in place. I bow to them to give me th

Health committee  I think our members would give you lots of good suggestions on how that can be done. I think looking at what is already in the possession of a business owner would be the start. So is an invoice enough? If you are going to go to a retailer, for example--many of the folks across

Health committee  We've certainly been talking to them and we're certainly providing our ideas. It won't be easy, I can tell you that right now. We know about privacy legislation and needs for policies in certain provinces that have been in place for five years, and we still know a bunch of member

Health committee  We have 13,000 manufacturing firms in Canada. These are Canadian-grown and Canadian-operated companies. I suspect that they would come under the provisions of that type of thing. That's just our membership. There's a much larger population. That's maybe 10% of the manufacturing p

Health committee  Sure. Labeling would be, I think, a big issue for small and medium-sized companies, simply because it would bring a level of complexity into the system. Our big issue when it comes to new legislation or regulations or policies is that we need to make sure that we're measuring t

Health committee  I was simply going to say that when you think about a small business that imports, there needs to be some assistance from government, perhaps, to say that these are the types of companies that are available to you that do or do not have the right products. I think a combination h

Health committee  Absolutely. There needs to be much better communication of where they need to go, what standards are expected, how they can go about figuring that out, and if there needs to be testing there's help on where that testing has to be done, such as for lead in a product.

Health committee  Thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to be here today. I must stress at the outset that I'm not a safety expert, nor do I know the details of all the standards, practices, and regulations of the many thousands of businesses my organization represents. But what I c

Government Operations committee  It's tough to get information out to small and medium-sized companies. We have in the past worked with OSME in trying to get information out, and with other business organizations. The big thing that came out of our research was that small businesses say that you have to go to