Health committee  For projects

Health committee  Just to follow up, it was open to all Canadians, and they have consulted with more than 7,000, I think, as you heard from people who were here before. And another thing is that we see the food guide as a tool to help with underpinning the healthy eating piece. We don't think that the food guide is going to cure obesity.

Health committee  For CDPAC, we have done some looking at this issue, because, as you say, we're concerned about it as well. We do see it as one piece. You were talking about the multi-pronged integrated.... This is one piece of it. Just to let you know, CDPAC has done a background paper looking at marketing and advertising to children, and I brought a few copies along, in French and English, for the committee to consider.

Finance committee  I'm not the best one to answer that. CDPAC is composed of a number of organizations, and one is the Canadian Psychological Association. My understanding is that this recommendation was part of the Kirby commission and came out of that particular piece. In terms of the specifics of exactly what that commission would do, I don't have the specifics.

Finance committee  When we talk about the walkways and bicycle paths, I know it's a little confusing because we had so much physical activity in this particular brief. On the infrastructure fees around those particular things—walkways, bike pathways, interconnectedness, etc.—we were suggesting that 7% of the transportation-related infrastructure funding would go to those pieces, so it is a separate piece actually.

Finance committee  The socio-economic determinants are extremely important in chronic disease prevention. We have a conference coming up in November, and we have quite a number of sessions linking chronic disease prevention and the whole economic piece. You're right, it's huge.

Finance committee  Absolutely. That's what I was trying to get at when I was saying I wasn't sure the tax piece would work by itself. It's nice to have people able to go and play hockey, but if the rinks are in bad shape, if you don't have the infrastructure for it to happen, then it's still not going to happen.

Finance committee  It's not that we don't support the other side of it as well. I know that the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada came forward with the tax incentive piece around physical activity, and we certainly support their view on that as well. We feel that this, in terms of the investment in the physical activity strategy and some of those pieces, has not happened, so we thought that was probably the more important thing to put forward at this moment.

Finance committee  That's a bit of a difficult question. I think there needs to be government investment in pieces like physical activity for our population, so that it goes across the ages and across the spectrum, so I think if I had to go with one or the other, I would go with that, because we've seen the benefits of it as well.

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Good morning, committee members. CDPAC is a network of about 60 voluntary public and private sector organizations. We have a provincial-territorial alliance, and we have a thousand active members within CDPAC. We're really looking at a country-wide movement toward the prevention of chronic disease and an integrated population health approach to that.