Madam Speaker, we are here to discuss a private member's bill. As you already know, I am referring to Bill C-398. This bill proposes amendments to the Food and Drugs Act that would make it mandatory to provide labelling of nutritional information for raw meat, poultry, fish and seafood.
More specifically, Bill C-398 would prohibit the importing or packaging of meat, poultry, fish or seafood for retail sale unless the labelling indicates, in both official languages, and in the manner stipulated, portion size, the number of calories, and the quantities of 13 nutritional elements that are found in the nutrition information panel.
I would like to make a few comments regarding the enormous amount of work that has been done in the area of food labelling.
On January 1 of this year, changes to food and drug regulations came into force. The new regulations require that most labels for prepackaged foods provide a nutrition information panel containing information on calories and the 13 essential nutritional elements contained in a specific portion size.
January 1, 2003, also marked the culmination of a four-year process as a result of the recommendations contained in the National Plan of Action for Nutrition. The purpose of this plan was to improve the effectiveness of nutritional labelling by providing more nutritional information and providing more information to the public as to how to use it.
An external advisory board was responsible for the process, which included research into consumer needs, as well as indepth consultations with all sectors, including consumers and the health and food industry sectors. It was a massive undertaking.
The nutrition information panel is an important way to help Canadians learn more about the foods they consume. This is important. The current nutritional labelling, combined with effective information, provides a significant opportunity to improve the nutritional health and welfare of Canadians.
This measure will allow Canadians to compare products more easily, to evaluate the nutritional value of a greater number of products and, finally, to better manage specific diets.
The new nutritional labelling will be easy to find, easy to read and easy to use. The nutrition information panel will only be a useful tool to help consumers make healthy nutritional choices if they know how to use the information. That is fairly obvious.
That is why Health Canada is committed to launching a large-scale education program. The Minister of Health recently launched an information package on nutrition labelling, as you are no doubt already aware, Madam Speaker.
This information package was specially designed for dietitians and other health providers to help them inform Canadians about nutrition labelling. It was sent to 8,300 dietitians, diabetes experts, provincial nutritionists and other essential partners in the area of nutrition across Canada.
The new regulations represent an enormous challenge for many sectors of the food industry, because certain foods must be tested and new labels must be produced.
These sectors need time to adjust. While some can spring into action very quickly to add the nutrition labelling format on their labels, others will need all the time provided under the regulations that will come into force.
For each product, the nutrition labelling format provides information on the nutrient content of food at the point of sale. The nutrient content of most foods varies for any number of reasons, and it is not possible to test a sample of each food before it is sold.
It is therefore necessary to provide for some exemptions, to accommodate situations where it would be difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to list nutrition facts for a variety of reasons.
Ensuring that a nutrition label contains valid information requires the testing of many samples of each food over time to take into account factors related to variability. These factors include the time of year, climatic conditions, soils and the feed given to animals.
The data do not exist for all products at this time. Because of the lack of information on nutritional composition, an exemption from including a nutrition information panel has been granted with respect to raw, single ingredient meats that are not ground, meat by-products, poultry meats, poultry meat by-products, and raw, single ingredient marine or freshwater animal products. That is the reason.
Bill C-398 further proposes that information on calories and nutritional composition may come from an independent chemical analysis of the product or from representative nutrition composition data recognized by the Department of Health.
During the public consultations that led to the new regulations on nutritional labelling, consumers and dietitians told Health Canada that the quantities of nutrients shown on the nutrition information panel should be accurate.
Industry wants to analyze these products in order to be able to provide consumers with nutrition information. However, there are many cuts of meat, and fat content varies significantly according to the grade of beef or the season in which seafood is harvested. Taking these factors and other variables into account, an unrealistic number of samples would have to be analyzed in order to obtain standardized data for nutritional labelling. Such analysis is expensive and time-consuming.
This change would obviously create precedents; moreover, the repercussions on all categories of products regulated by the act and the constitutionality of such a change have not been evaluated.
In conclusion, the intent of Bill C-398 is clearly to provide consumers with more information about the nutritional value of the foods they eat. However, the current lack of representative data on meats, poultry and raw fish and seafood creates a risk that it might become mandatory to provide consumers with inaccurate information. That is not what we want to do. The information provided must be correct and that is what the dietitians told us.