Health committee  The assessment was made on the data collected as part of the monitoring program, and the monitoring program has shown that the food service sector did not evolve with the same speed as the prepackaged sector in the reduction of trans fats. That's based on a collection of sample

Health committee  The level of 1% comes from a World Health Organization recommendation that--

Health committee  It is a health-based science, but it is also an estimate that was made based on food intakes. Essentially, it accounts for the diet, and as was mentioned--

Health committee  No, it's about the diet. The diet contains natural sources of trans fats. Even with the natural sources of trans fat, our advice is to reduce those natural sources of trans fat in terms of dietary choices--not in products, but in terms of dietary sources.

Health committee  It's the processed trans fats that are actually subject to a ban. I would go back to the effectiveness of some of these measures for banning trans fat at the retail level, specifically in the food service sector. You need to have measures taken upstream around the availability

Health committee  As was mentioned, in his announcement in 2007 the Minister of Health gave the industry two years to meet the recommendations of the trans fat task force. At the end of the two years and after the implementation of the trans fat monitoring program, there is an assessment period th

Health committee  The responsibility for making safe foods available is actually industry's responsibility. What Health Canada does is develop the requirements that will ensure we have a safe food supply. That's essentially what I indicated in my introductory notes. We're looking at the feasibilit

Health committee  We're using the best available science we have, and also all the levers that are under the oversight of the Department of Health in order to mitigate the health effects.

Health committee  Definitely the monitoring program was a major milestone in that regard, and that's essentially the commitment made by the Minister of Health in 2007. We are seeing right now the end of the monitoring program. In fact, we published the last set of data in December 2009. Our scien

Health committee  Our role is essentially to oversee the food supply and to use our regulatory and non-regulatory levers to achieve public health outcomes, and in that regard we've mentioned the replacement options. Some of these replacement options are required to undergo a pre-market review. We

Health committee  If we're talking about regulation that would limit the levels of trans fat in prepackaged foods and essentially be applicable to prepackaged foods, regulations would apply without distinction between products produced domestically and made available domestically and those produce

Health committee  It would be just like that. That's why one of the issues we need to look at when we develop and analyze the regulatory option is the impact of that regulatory option on some of our trade agreements.

Health committee  One of the first elements I would mention in that regard is Canada's food guide. Its new version, which was made available in 2007, clearly made recommendations to Canadians to limit their consumption of trans fats and saturated fats. We have made clear recommendations on how die

Health committee  A lot of the reduction in intake that we have seen is attributed to the success of the labelling regulations, particularly in the prepackaged sector.

Health committee  We definitely relied on what has happened in other jurisdictions. We learned from Denmark as a main jurisdiction, because it was one of the earliest jurisdictions that used regulation to limit the level of trans fat. There was definitely success in that regard in decreasing the l