Health committee  There is no question whatsoever that if the age limit were increased to 17 and below, the marketing restrictions would be more effective in public health outcomes. I'm somewhat perplexed by people mentioning that there's some legal threshold. As you said, the most typical legal

Health committee  May I speak to that?

Health committee  Thank you. I think it's an excellent question. I actually think you've underlined the importance of restricting marketing. Many parents think that juice and chocolate milk are healthy drinks. In fact, you might know that they have as much or more sugar than a bottle of Coke, fo

Health committee  Thank you, and good afternoon. I'm testifying today as an individual expert. I don't accept any industry funding and I don't represent any organization. My expertise is in consumer health behaviour. I've studied tobacco marketing for almost 20 years and food marketing for the

Health committee  That's a great question, and I don't envy any provincial or federal regulator on this issue because you have people from both sides saying you need to loosen and you need to tighten. I can tell you this, we've done work with young people looking at health warnings for cannabis, a

Health committee  I think it's a reasonable question. Why don't we have nutrition labels on alcohol products? We have them on bottled water. We have them on every other beverage that's sold in this country except alcohol. There are other countries that have sought to prohibit marketing of what the

Health committee  If I understand your question correctly, as I read the act, that is the objective, to eliminate any promotion that's going to encourage use or make it appealing to young people, but to recognize that for manufacturers and consumers, there is still product information that will be

Health committee  We're quite right that cigarettes are very uniform in terms of how they're sold, but if we broaden the market a little bit to include smokeless tobacco and other nicotine products, we see the sort of variability that you might see in the cannabis market. With respect to the 30-

Health committee  I think one of the reasons why I haven't spoken to some of the broader promotions is that I think it's generally fairly well constructed. As I read it, the act would restrict any types of sponsorship. In other words, a cannabis company can't pay to have their product in a movie o

Health committee  I'm sorry for mentioning the word “tobacco” again, but you know, there's nothing stopping.... When you sell a product in another country, you follow that country's laws. I think there's some wording in the act where you're not allowed to advertise through foreign media for Canadi

Health committee  That's a good point. I use the term “standardize” because that's essentially what you're doing. We talked about standardizing the look in terms of similar background, colours, and no logos. Certain countries regulate the shape and size. We do have a diversity of tobacco products

Health committee  Yes. It's what you said has happened in other jurisdictions for cannabis. It's the sort of system that we've gotten better at with tobacco internationally, and that is the way to reduce illicit tobacco. For the record, it is not difficult to counterfeit any packaging you might w

Health committee  Sure. I've worked with our government and governments around the world to assist with this. Right now, for other products we have rotating warnings. It's up to a government to determine the key messages and risks that they'd like to communicate. You can have a number of different

Health committee  I testify in court cases. I'm no stranger to the tobacco companies and their activities, but I must admit this past week I have been alarmed by the extent to which the tobacco companies have been infiltrating this discussion. I'll just leave it at that.

Health committee  I think we need to be a little careful about using the tobacco and alcohol markets, because if we started regulating those markets based on public health, they would not look like they do now. Tobacco products would not be sold. Where we're at with those markets is partly due to