Moved second reading of Bill S-290, An Act to prohibit the promotion of alcoholic beverages.

He said: Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to a simple bill, Bill S-290, An Act to prohibit the promotion of alcoholic beverages.

This is a public health bill. We are all aware of the enormous cost of health care in this country. The bill is about the overall health of Canadians. It seeks to bring about a generational change, a change for the better. I would ask you to keep this principle, the principle of a generational shift in public health, in mind during the next few minutes as I explain the reasons behind Bill S-290.

Before continuing, I would like to thank the many dedicated health researchers who helped develop this bill, including Dr. Adam Sherk of the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, and all the members of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria. In addition, my office owes a great deal to the Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation Community of Practice, also known as CAPE. This interdisciplinary group of policy-makers, practitioners and people with lived experience continues to be a source of inspiration, support and policy knowledge as we work to reduce alcohol-related harms in Canada. Special thanks to project coordinator Tina Price for her leadership.

Colleagues, the alcohol industry has had a free pass for far too long. The damage caused by their addictive and carcinogenic products has a higher societal cost than tobacco. However, Canada banned tobacco advertising in 1989. That was 35 years ago. Tobacco companies fought tooth and nail to keep their advertising front and centre. The alcohol industry is no different. They are very well funded and desperately trying to keep the public in the dark.

When I introduced Bill S-254, which called for cancer warnings on alcoholic beverage containers, senators were in favour of referring it to committee. During the debates, some senators spoke at length about the many harms, other than cancer, caused by alcohol consumption, and wondered whether listing all these harms would take up all the space on the label. Indeed, the list of proven alcohol-related harms is indisputably long. If I were to list them all now, I would exceed my speaking time by several hours, so I’ll just highlight a few.

Alcohol is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen. It is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in Canada. Worldwide, it causes six deaths every minute, or three million deaths a year. Alcohol contributes to more than 200 serious conditions and complications.

Honourable senators, it is now seven o’clock. Pursuant to rule 3-3(1), I am obliged to leave the chair until eight o’clock, when we will resume, unless it is your wish, honourable senators, to not see the clock.

Is it agreed to not see the clock?

Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.

Some Hon. Senators: No.

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: I hear a “no.”

Honourable senators, leave was not granted. The sitting is, therefore, suspended, and I will leave the chair until eight o’clock.

(The sitting of the Senate was suspended.)

Alcohol, a Group 1 carcinogen, is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in Canada. Worldwide, it causes six deaths every minute, or three million deaths a year. Alcohol contributes to more than 200 diseases, injuries and other health conditions and is a leading cause of preventable death. Worldwide, alcohol is responsible for 18% of suicides. In Canada, that number is even higher. Around 20% to 30% of deaths by suicide involve alcohol consumption.

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, “in almost half of all observed cases of violence and aggression, alcohol consumption by the aggressor is involved.”

There is no medically safe quantity of alcohol to consume when trying to get pregnant or while nursing. Alcohol is indisputably toxic to fetuses. Its effects, such as miscarriage and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, are unpredictable and irreversible. Other risks specific to women include high levels of alcohol in the blood, rapid intoxication and an increased risk of breast cancer and liver damage.

For men, the data show that they are more likely to be involved in collisions when they drive under the influence of alcohol, be hospitalized for alcohol-related medical emergencies and be diagnosed with an alcohol-related disorder. They are also more likely to die from alcohol-related causes.

For young people, alcohol is a major behavioural risk factor for death and social problems. They’re also more likely to binge drink than other groups, which increases their risk of injury, aggression, general violence, intimate partner violence and deteriorating academic performance. For this group, alcohol consumption also leads to more negative outcomes due to their greater impulsivity, lower emotional maturity, low body weight and faster driving speeds.

You will no doubt be interested to know that one study found that more than half of Canadian students in Grades 7 to 12 had consumed alcohol in 2021 and 2022 and, on average, had tried their first alcoholic beverage at 13 years of age.

As noted in the Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health, “Recent longitudinal studies show that young people with higher levels of exposure to marketing are more likely to initiate alcohol use and consume alcohol in harmful patterns.”

The same journal notes that the alcohol industry is using new “stealth marketing” tactics such as product placements and the creation of new media profiles, channels, brand names, graphical designs or slogans with the intent for those digital elements to closely resemble the alcohol brand’s corporate identity.

Social influencers also significantly shape purchasing decisions.

As you know from our discussion of Bill S-254, a direct causal link has been established between alcohol consumption and at least seven known types of fatal cancers.

After cancer, heart disease is the second-leading cause of death in Canada. Remarkably, Your Honour, red wine sales continue to benefit from the utterly debunked health halo effect. Contrary to modern mythology, drinking red wine does not at all decrease the risk of ischemic heart disease. This is important because many health-conscious Canadians still accept this myth as fact and consume it thinking they are benefiting their health.

For a great many others, the health halo allows them to accept that first drink — for their health, of course — but then they find themselves unable to stop. Why? It’s not because they are bad people; it’s because it is an addictive substance. It causes physical dependence.

The Canadian Mental Health Association notes that physical dependence increases tolerance of this drug, leading to the need for more and more to achieve the same effect.

Once dependence is established, stopping it without medical supervision can be deadly. Withdrawal symptoms can include sleeplessness, tremors, nausea and seizures. People in this state can experience hallucinations, confusion, fever and a racing heart. Untreated, this situation can result in death.

I could go on and on, Your Honour. This information is readily available to the public. Having said that, if senators are looking for more data, they should certainly contact my office and we will provide them with everything they need.

When we talk about restricting the advertising of alcohol, some may think such a thing is impossible, given how much money governments make on alcohol sales.

For those unfamiliar, I would like to introduce the concept of the alcohol deficit in Canada. This number refers to the difference between the amount of revenue the government collects via alcohol sales and taxes and the amount it spends on trying to clean up the societal harms.

Dr. Adam Sherk, in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, writes:

In Canada in 2020, governments generated CAD $13.3 billion in revenue from alcohol sales, but this was offset by $19.7 billion in social costs attributable to alcohol use. This “alcohol deficit” increased by 122.0% in real-dollar terms over the study period and reached a high of $6.4 billion in 2020. . . .

In case that point is not clear, let me state it another way: Governments — all of them, provincial, territorial and federal — spend much more dealing with alcohol-related harms than they take in through revenue. It flies in the face of economic common sense to keep this charade going.

When we speak of government money, we are actually speaking of taxpayers’ dollars. So, to be very clear, it is the taxpayers who are paying for the cleanup in health care, lost productivity and criminal justice costs of alcohol harms.

Taxpayers are on the hook for all the alcohol harm costs, such as in-patient hospitalizations, day surgeries, emergency department visits, paramedic services, specialized treatment, physician time and prescription drugs.

Taxpayers are also paying for lost productivity in terms of premature deaths, long-term disability, short-term disability through absenteeism and impaired performance on the job.

Taxpayers are paying through the nose for astronomical criminal justice costs in policing, the courts, correctional services and enforcement of impaired driving laws.

Taxpayers are also funding research and prevention programs and paying for fire damage, motor vehicle damage and drug testing in the workplace.

Highly paid alcohol lobbyists will trot out every argument under the sun to prevent changes to alcohol advertising laws. These are the same sad, defeated arguments used by the tobacco industry about 25 years ago. Just as the tobacco industry fought a ban on advertising, saying it denied them their freedom of speech, the alcohol industry will do exactly the same thing.

In the case of tobacco, the Supreme Court of Canada found the public health objective of restricting tobacco advertising to be more important than “low-value commercial expression” by industry. When presented with even greater amounts of rock solid, unequivocal alcohol harm data, we can reasonably expect the same result.

Some well-meaning legislators under the influence of industry may object that government should not be so heavy-handed. Such people believe that governments should just put out some public service announcements about alcohol harms instead. Unfortunately, this is naïve. As noted by Public Health Ontario, when it comes to messaging to the public, governments cannot possibly match the complexity and reach of industry.

For each advertising dollar governments are able to spend, industry has thousands more. Public relations countermeasures like public service announcements are necessary, but they are insufficient. They are a nice idea and may indeed play a role, but alone are inadequate.

In the words of Public Health Ontario, it is:

. . . unlikely that the substantial resources needed to promote and sustain the same level of health messaging would be available to the public sector.

The World Health Organization recommends comprehensive bans on alcohol marketing. As they put it:

Bans and comprehensive restrictions on alcohol advertising, sponsorship and promotion are impactful and cost-effective measures. Enacting and enforcing bans or comprehensive restrictions on exposure to them in the digital world will bring public health benefits and help protect children, adolescents and abstainers from the pressure to start consuming alcohol.

They note — if you will forgive me, quite “dryly” — the following:

Alcohol producers, retailers and the marketing industry are normally consulted when the government makes changes in alcohol marketing regulations and practices. However, the published record indicates that, in general, these industry bodies do not support tighter statutory restrictions on marketing practices.

Similarly, Your Honour, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction tells us that:

. . . there is an urgent need to review Canada’s regulations respecting the promotion and advertising of alcohol, as well as their enforcement.

Your Honour, what this bill proposes is simple. It’s logical. Restricting the advertising of one deadly and addictive Group 1 carcinogen while allowing advertising of another deadly and addictive Group 1 carcinogen to proliferate does not make any sense.

Bill S-290 is modelled directly on the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act and the Cannabis Act. I’m not suggesting anything radical or out of left field. We are not reinventing the wheel here. It is the alcohol industry and their enablers that are the outliers. They have been granted much more leeway than the tobacco or cannabis industries for no discernible sensible reason. Giving alcohol promoters extensive freedoms denied to tobacco and cannabis is incoherent. Perhaps we can understand how those in days gone by may have balked at tinkering with free enterprise this way.

However, Your Honour, the jury is back. The data is in. The research is done, and it is conclusive. The economic and social costs greatly outweigh any revenue raked in by governments. For those who like hard, granular numbers, let’s use Ontario data from 2020 as an example: People in Ontario consumed the equivalent of 457 standard drinks of alcohol per person aged 15 and over. This usage led directly to 6,202 deaths, 38,043 years of productive life lost and 319,580 hospital admissions. That year, Ontario’s alcohol net revenue was $5.162 billion. The economic cost of cleaning up the mess was $7.109 billion. So, for that year, Ontario’s alcohol deficit was an astounding $1.9 billion.

I remind you the situation is the same in every province and territory, Your Honour. It’s time to put an end to this — not because I say so, but because the health professionals say so. The data is in; the research is in. Now it’s up to legislators to put this in motion to change a generation of people.

Industry will argue about their good works in sponsoring arts, athletics and environmental community projects. Many of their efforts may be well-meaning, but researchers have also found not so well-meaning industry activity. Take the case of the causal link between fatal cancers and alcohol consumption. Researcher Mark Petticrew has found that the alcohol industry misleads the public on the cancer risk of their product, using tried and true tactics: denial and omission, distortion and distraction. They deny or dispute the link between alcohol and cancer; they distort and downplay cancer risks; they distract by focusing attention away from the independent effects of alcohol and instead point to a wide range of other risk factors and causes of illness.

If we tighten regulations in one area of advertising, marketing and promotion, industry simply shifts dollars to another area. They are always one step ahead in this globalized, digitized and interconnected world. That is why significant restriction — as on tobacco and cannabis — is necessary.

Your Honour, we collectively stood up to the tobacco industry. We were right to do so, and we are right to do so here. Given the enormous amount of evidence, it is irrational from every standpoint to keep giving this one particular addictive, carcinogenic, psychoactive substance a free pass. For the greater good of public health of Canadians in this generation and those to come, let’s end the era of overly permissive alcohol promotion. Let’s get this right.

I thank you for your time. Meegwetch.

Would Senator Brazeau take a question?

Yes.

Thank you, Senator Brazeau, for your speech. There has been a normalization of heavy drinking for women, particularly on social media. How could this bill impact that normalization?

Thank you, Senator Osler, for that very important question. I will just take the issue of tobacco. In the last 20 years, since we stopped the promotion of tobacco products, smoking went down by approximately 20%.

As you mentioned, alcohol is widely accepted. There have been many mistruths about alcohol from the industry itself. We have to start somewhere. What I’ve found in introducing the two bills that I have done on alcohol is that it is giving health practitioners and experts a forum so that they are not afraid to talk about the negative impacts of alcohol. I think that because it has been so socially accepted, there are many health experts who may not be as confident to tell their patients, for example, about the negative impacts.

We have to start somewhere, and the best way to start is by banning the promotion of it. I can certainly guarantee you that, within a generation, the wait times in hospitals will decrease, there will be far fewer suicides, fewer deaths, et cetera. But we have to start somewhere.

In 1988 alcohol was labelled a Group 1 carcinogen. There have been 10 elections since then. If we do the exact same thing that former parliamentarians did, we will be passing it on to another generation to deal with. If we do that, nothing will get better. Nothing will improve.

I think we have a very good opportunity here, and not just that. I would have hoped for this bill to be a government bill, but this is not a vote winner. It is not a “vote getter.” I understand that. That’s why I believe the Senate has a perfect opportunity to showcase and demonstrate what it can do on behalf of Canadians.

Here, we’re specifically talking about the health of Canadians and changing, hopefully, a generation of Canadians for years to come for the better. But we have to start somewhere, and hopefully this will be the springboard to do just that so that numbers decrease with respect to alcohol consumption in Canada.

Yes.

Thank you very much, Senator Dasko, for that question. I’m sitting here as an independent senator. I’m not here to make any political points. Having said that, in answer to your question, when I introduced Bill S-254 about two years ago, my office wrote to every federal political party, asking them what their policies on alcohol were. To make a long story short, I have never heard from any of them to this day.

I met with the former Minister of Mental Health and Addictions at some point about a year ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t get one question in about Bill S-254.

So, in answer to your question, as I said, it’s not a vote-getter now, but if more and more Canadians are aware of the negative impacts of alcohol — of that drug — well, it will become a vote‑getter. I can guarantee you that citizens across this country will put a lot more pressure on elected politicians to do something about this, knowing what they do now. So when we hear provincial governments saying alcohol sales are important and that they bring in money — yes, they do. But it’s time that Canadians know that they are flipping the bill for all the negative damage that it causes and that far too often goes unreported.

Thanks very much for your speech, Senator Brazeau, and for championing this important topic. Speaking of vote-getters, the current federal government seems to think that a vote-getter is to include beer and wine in their current GST holiday, temporarily, for two months. It starts on December 14, and they project that it will last until mid‑February. So that would also include, as I mentioned in the chamber the other day, dry January, which is a time when a lot of people try to encourage people to quit drinking and to significantly lessen their alcohol intake for the health reasons that you spoke about very eloquently today. What do you think about the fact that the federal government is including beer and wine and not a number of other, very essential items in that GST holiday?

Well, thank you for the question. I think it goes without saying that I’m certainly not in support of that GST tax break on alcohol. It looks as if they took a page out of the Doug Ford book in dealing with alcohol. One is a Liberal party and the other is a PC party, but having said that, as I said, I’m not making political points. All I’m saying is that I think it’s time for all political parties to take this seriously because it’s affecting a lot of people’s lives directly. Where are the fiscal leaders we have in Canada? We’re talking about deficits here. I will leave it at that. Thank you.

That’s a very good point you made on the deficits and the costs of that. I know you only had a certain amount of time to give that speech, but you covered a lot of ground. Maybe you can comment on alcohol as an addiction. You spoke about that, but it can cycle with other types of addictions. Sometimes people are addicted to other substances or behaviours and alcohol becomes one of the things that is included in that equation of cycling. And because it’s so socially acceptable, it could be something that maybe adds to people’s difficulties with that. Could you comment on that topic?

Well, obviously I can’t speak for everybody; it’s a case-by-case basis. But in terms of my own experience, alcohol was the number-one substance, and then you mix in other substances because, as I said in my speech, you build a tolerance to alcohol. And once you’ve built that tolerance, you need more to get the same effect. As I said, in my experience, alcohol was the primary substance, and then there are other substances as well.

Smoking tobacco is legal in Canada, but there’s no promotion or advertising of it; it’s the same thing with cannabis. So the real question that needs to be asked is this: Why do alcohol companies and the alcohol industry get a free pass? If anybody could give me an answer to that, maybe I’d be satisfied. However, I haven’t met anybody who has given me an answer that I could consider.

Would the honourable senator take a question?

Yes.

You talked about alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. And you know that I brought a bill through recently, Bill S-269, which is trying to pull the reins in on advertising. This is a different lane but a very similar time right now. We would have loved to have considered a full ban on advertising. But we did a lot of constitutional work with the Supreme Court history on what bar alcohol reaches and challenges in the Supreme Court regarding alcohol and cannabis.

I’m, of course, watching this closely because if alcohol can or does get recognized, the request for a full ban will be right around the corner with the advertising.

So I’m wondering if you want to comment on that, because they are connected. We spent months learning what tobacco went through in the 1980s and 1990s, and we kind of fit that into the alcohol/cannabis category. So from that perspective, I’m wondering if you can comment.

Well, in my opinion, based on my own personal history, alcohol is the new tobacco, but I will go even further than that: As I mentioned in my remarks, the negative impacts of alcohol far outweigh any negative impacts of most other substances put together. That’s why we need an outright ban on advertising it in Canada, just as we did with tobacco products.