- Member of Parliament
- Member of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
- NDP
- Vancouver Kingsway
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 59%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $153,893.57
- Government Page
moved for leave to introduce Bill C-382, An Act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Income Tax Act (extra-energy-efficient products).
He said: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to introduce this legislation, with thanks to the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith for seconding it.
The bill would amend the Excise Tax Act to exempt extra-energy-efficient products from the GST and the HST, including heat pumps, household appliances, lighting fixtures, electric motors and electronics. It would also amend the Income Tax Act to provide a tax credit for the purchase of these products. This would put money back in people's pockets, reduce our energy consumption and encourage a shift towards more sustainable consumption.
The bill represents a key investment in our future. Its urgency is underscored by the premature exhaustion of funds from the federal greener homes grant program. I urge all members to support this important initiative for a greener, more sustainable and more affordable Canada for all Canadians.
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- Oct/6/23 12:10:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada's blood inventory is entering its fourth month of serious shortages. This is the first time this has ever happened. This dangerous situation is putting patients at risk. If collections drop further, elective surgeries may have to be cancelled.
Experts warned the Liberals that privatizing plasma collection would jeopardize our blood supply. Allowing companies to pay donors is clearly hurting Canadian Blood Services. What is the government doing to protect our national blood supply?
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak in support of Bill C-252, which has the laudable goal of prohibiting food and beverage marketing directed at children of materials that are unhealthy and damaging to their health. This legislation is long overdue.
By way of a background, Canada's New Democrats have been advocating for a ban on unhealthy food and beverage marketing to children for many years. In 2012, over 10 years ago, the NDP member of Parliament for New Westminster—Burnaby introduced legislation to expressly prohibit advertising and promotion for commercial purposes of products, food, drugs, cosmetics or devices directly to children under 13 years of age. One can tell already from that short list that the bill was more ambitious than the one we are discussing today, which deals only with unhealthy food and beverages, but it dealt and engaged with the very same concepts before the House today.
In 2016, as has already been heard in the House, Senator Nancy Greene Raine introduced the child health protection act. It was called Bill S-228, and that legislation would have banned the marketing of unhealthy food and beverages primarily directed at children under 17 years of age. A bit later I will touch on how this bill has reduced that age to 13, and of course, under 17 would have been more ambitious. As I will advocate in my remarks today, it would have been preferable.
Health Canada held an online consultation in 2017 to seek feedback on restricting the marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to children. That was over six years ago. That consultation was open to the public, health organizations, industry and any interested stakeholders.
At the House Standing Committee on Health at that time, the Liberals unfortunately amended Bill S-228 to reduce the age limit from under 17 years to under 13 years old. They also added a five-year legislative review, which is a prudent measure.
According to UNICEF Canada, the proposed age cut-off of 17 was more likely than a younger age threshold to protect the most vulnerable from the harmful impacts of marketing. While there are different interpretations of children's evolving cognitive capacities, research suggests very strongly that not only are teens exposed to more ads than younger children and remember them better, but also that they have more means. Teenagers who are 15 and 16 years of age often have more expendable or disposable income, act in a more unsupervised manner and are more likely to purchase unhealthy foods than children under 13, yet I think, due to pressure from the industry, that threshold was reduced to 13.
Although Bill S-228 did pass third reading in both the House and the Senate, unfortunately that bill died on the Order Paper due to a Conservative filibuster in the Senate prior to the 2019 federal election. That has left us where we are at today.
I would also comment that the Liberal government has made a number of commitments since it was elected in 2015 that remain unfulfilled on this issue. The former Liberal health minister, in her 2019 mandate letter, was directed to “introduce new restrictions on the commercial marketing of food and beverages to children”. That was never followed through with.
The current health minister's 2021 mandate letter instructed him to support “restrictions on the commercial marketing of food and beverages to children.” I suppose it can be said he is supporting that, in the sense that the government side is supporting this legislation, but we must remember there has been no action from the government. This is a private member's bill we are dealing with here, not a government bill.
What is the result of the inaction? It is not benign. Each year, the Canadian food and beverage industry spends over $1.1 billion on marketing to children. This marketing appeals to children through product design, the use of cartoon or other characters, as well as fantasy and adventure themes, humour and other marketing techniques. Clearly these techniques work, with there being children as young as three years old who are brand aware and can recognize or name food and beverage brands.
This marketing to children means that over 50 million food and beverage ads per year are shown on children's top 10 websites alone. Their personal identifying information is collected from websites and apps for the purposes of further targeting online marketing. Children in Canada are observing an estimated 1,500 advertisements annually, just on social media sites alone, and nearly 90% of food and beverages marketed on television and online are high in salt, sugars and saturated fat. That is what we as policy-makers are faced with in the current situation.
Let us look at the facts. Poor nutrition and unhealthy food and beverage are key contributors to poor health in children. Good eating habits and avoidance of unhealthy food are key preventative elements of health policy. There is strong agreement among leading Canadian pediatric and allied health organizations that the impact of food and beverage marketing is real, significant and harmful to children's development.
Marketing to children has changed dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years. Today it is a seamless, sophisticated and often interactive process. The line between ads and children's entertainment has blurred with marketing messages being inserted into places that children play and learn. Marketing of food and beverages to children in Canada is largely self-regulated by the same industries that profit from the practice. Research reveals that these voluntary measures are not working. Numerous studies have found strong associations between increases in advertising of non-nutritious foods and rates of childhood obesity. One study by Yale University found that children exposed to junk food advertising ate 45% more junk food than children not exposed to such advertisements. In Canada, as much as 90% of the food marketed to children and youth on TV and online is unhealthy.
Three-quarters of children are exposed to food marketing while using their favourite social media applications. Again, the majority of those ads is for unhealthy foods that are ultraprocessed and beverages that are high in saturated fats, salt and sugar. This does not just affect children. Canadians are the second-largest buyers of ultraprocessed foods and drinks in the world, second only to the Americans. The result is that nearly one in three Canadian children is overweight or obese. The rise in childhood obesity in recent decades is linked to changes in our eating habits. Overweight children are more likely to develop health problems later in life, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.
Children are uniquely vulnerable to marketing manipulation until the point that they achieve two specific information-processing skills. The first is the ability to perceive the difference between commercial and non-commercial content, and the second is the ability to understand the persuasive intent behind advertising. Before the age of five, most children cannot distinguish ads from unbiased programming. Children under eight do not understand the intent of marketing messages, and they believe what they see. By age 10 to 12, children do understand that ads are designed to sell products, but they are not always able to be critical of these ads.
Canada needs to get in step with other countries in the world. Other jurisdictions have since adopted similar legislation, including Norway, the United Kingdom and Ireland. By the way, my Conservative colleague was questioned about Quebec earlier and the impact of their legislation, which has restrictions on advertising to children.
Here are the facts: Quebec's restrictions on advertising to children have been shown to have a positive impact on nutrition by reducing fast food consumption by 13%. That translates to 17 million fewer fast food meals sold in the province and an estimated 13.4 million fewer fast food calories consumed per year. Quebec has the lowest rates of obesity among five- to 17-year-olds in the country, as well as the highest rates of vegetable and fruit consumption in Canada. That is relative to every other province. Now, it is true that childhood obesity rate are rising everywhere, but I think the effect of this marketing is quite clear, which is that it has slowed the rising obesity and unhealthy consumption of food marketing in Quebec, partially at least because of their early and, I think, progressive adoption of legislation before the House now.
I would also point out that Quebec has prohibited all commercial advertising targeting children under the age of 13 since 1980, so it is very clear that it is the time for the rest of the country to get in step with this. I think most of us in here are parents, have siblings who are parents, or maybe intend to be parents at some point. Certainly, we were all once children. It should be non-controversial to say that marketing of unhealthy products to our children in this country should be something that we are vigilant on and that we should act to prohibit. I urge all my colleagues to support this legislation before the House today.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my hon. colleague for this bill, which we will be supporting.
My question concerns the age. My colleague referred to Senator Greene Raine's bill from 2016, which would have prohibited marketing to children under 17 years of age. At that time, the Liberals, her colleagues, at the health committee amended that bill to reduce the target age from 17 to 13. According to UNICEF, the proposed cut-off of 17 was more likely than a younger age threshold to protect the most vulnerable from the harmful impacts of marketing. We know that teens are exposed to more ads than younger children and that they remember them better.
Is my colleague interested in watching to see if the food manufacturers target more ads at 14-year-olds to 17-year-olds, and does she agree with the NDP that we have to be very vigilant to protect those children as well from this kind of marketing?
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- May/18/23 3:07:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, a new report shows the number of Canadian teenagers regularly vaping is now shockingly among the highest in the world. This puts the health and lives of youth at great risk, and experts say it is Liberal inaction fuelling this growing crisis. The government's refusal to take on big tobacco is allowing it to use flavoured products to hook a new generation of Canadians.
Why are Liberals standing back while big tobacco uses flavours like cotton candy to lure teenagers into become addicted to nicotine?
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Madam Speaker, I think everybody in the House agrees that we need to up our game in this country to protect Canadians and our society from cyber-attacks.
My specific question has to do with certain specific vulnerable groups. I am thinking of young people, particularly teenagers between the ages, say, of 13 and 19. Even more particularly I am thinking of young girls and women who may be subject to all sorts of cyber-bullying and other offences, as well as seniors who can be victims of cyber-fraud.
I am wondering if my hon. colleague has any thoughts as to how Bill C-26 might impact those particularly vulnerable groups and what suggestions he may have legislatively to help protect them.
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- Feb/16/23 10:32:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we absolutely need to open up the Canada Health Act, but we need to do it for the purpose that the NDP is talking about today. This is to close the loopholes that are allowing private, for-profit care to creep into our system. Right now, we have a shortage of doctors in our hospitals. We have a shortage of nurses in this country. Staff are burnt out at every hospital. How can it possibly be a positive development to allow private clinics to drain people from that system and then allow access based on private access to care?
We have to add profit and administrative costs to the system. By the way, the United States pays 31¢ out of every dollar to administration. In Canada, we pay under 2%. Administrative costs are much higher in the private system. If we drain those workers, what is going to happen to the wait times in the public system? Obviously, they will get longer.
We need to close the loopholes to make it clear that all publicly insured services in this country are delivered in the public health care system. Let us build up our public system. Canadians deserve to have timely access to world-class care. They are not getting it now. New Democrats will continue to make proposals so they can get that.
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- Oct/6/22 3:45:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was a pleasure to serve with the member on NSICOP. The motion is, I think, very well crafted. It identifies the problem in a very pithy way, and it identifies four concrete solutions. I suppose there are always things to add, and the Conservatives could have added an amendment if they had wanted to.
In terms of inputs, what we are talking about here is plain gouging. It is my assertion that corporations, including food companies, are using the supply chain problems as a cover to gouge consumers. There is no question about that, because their increases bear no resemblance whatsoever to any of the input costs, including wages, which is usually the single largest component of any product, like a food product. They are gouging agricultural producers as well. It is certainly not our farmers who are reaping the benefits of these prices. It is the food companies themselves. That is why we are zeroing in on them.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague for that creative solution. She is absolutely right that Canada is facing a labour shortage that is really unprecedented. As health critic I see this most acutely in the health care sector, where across this country, in every profession, we have a shortage of workers and they are facing a crisis.
Any measures and policies that are fair, that are targeted at getting people back in the workforce, and that encourage people to work are something we should be looking at. Any policy that discourages someone from entering the workforce is something that is unacceptable and should be changed.
I am happy to look at any proposal that the Bloc has in this regard.
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- Feb/19/22 5:55:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know my hon. colleague is a trained lawyer, as am I. We have all heard some concerns raised by the general public that the invocation of the Emergencies Act may set a precedent, so I am curious about his thoughts on that.
I would particularly be interested in his views on the converse of that, which is if we did not act in these circumstances, what kind of precedent does he think might be set by people using economic hostage taking to try to force a change in policy of a democratically elected government. Is he concerned about that also setting a bad precedent in this nation?
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