Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Mr. Wappel, I take great interest in the bill you have proposed because I take great interest in the health of Canadians.
I want to be clear on something. Earlier in your comments you suggested that 30% of the food dollar is spent away from home by Canadians. This doesn't mean Canadians eat away from home 30% of the time. I think that would be a mistake. If I understand the stats right, Canadians eat away from home one out of ten meals, and there's also the stat that they skip one out of ten meals, so they're eating the eight other meals at home. So if we have obesity problems, if we have diabetes problems, it means people aren't properly preparing their own meals. The restaurant industry is not necessarily what should be targeted.
If I understand your bill correctly, you're not just targeting the restaurant industry, but the biggest problem seems to be with the restaurant industry. I think we have a challenge here. Even the menu you've provided doesn't do what you claim. It does for four items, “Lifestyle Choices”; it doesn't do it for all the rest of the menu. They've provided the information for the healthy ones but not for the others. I guess they could go through all of them. I'm not sure how much research would be involved and who's going to pay for it. I do take great offence at Mr. Geffery's providing it to you, though.
I think it's important for us to discuss things here as members of Parliament with the information and knowledge that we have. I know you haven't met with the restaurant industry; you didn't see any need to seek them out. A lot of restaurants in my riding have contacted me. A lot of chains have contacted me. I have a great concern about this bill the way it's proposed. I also think some consumers may make the wrong decision. When you suggest that the menu options on the menu board should just have the number of calories per serving, it's misleading in a lot of places.
I'm also a big fan of something Mr. Merrifield said earlier, ParticipAction and encouraging people to have healthy lifestyles. I don't think ParticipAction--the last time I saw the program anyway, when I was a child--actually did what it needed to do for children. I think that idea is great, the concept, but the program was actually inhibiting to children who were slightly overweight because of the way they were ranked. It needed to be redeveloped and remodelled, and not cancelled. That would have been a better way to deal with it.
So my question is, could we not come up with something that would offer a better incentive for healthy meals? Could we not come up with something like the idea I mentioned at the last committee meeting, for example, the removal of perhaps the PST and the GST--or HST, depending on which province you're in--on healthy meal choices to encourage people to choose those healthy meal choices in restaurants?