OTTAWA — Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq said Friday the government will oppose legislation that would require her to implement recommendations of her own expert panel aimed at getting Canadians to use less salt.
A private member’s bill from NDP health critic Libby Davies, debated at second reading in the House of Commons on Friday, calls on Aglukkaq to act on the advice of members of the Sodium Working Group, convened by her Conservative predecessor in the health portfolio, Tony Clement, to devise a strategy to reduce the sodium intake of Canadians.
Most of the recommendations, developed by industry representatives, public-health experts and Health Canada bureaucrats, have been collecting dust since the group presented Aglukkaq with its recommendations in 2010.
“It’s not a strategy I came up with, it’s a strategy that already exists. It was developed by the expert Sodium Working Group in 2010,” Davies told MPs Friday.
“The federal government must demonstrate its leadership and follow through on the incredible body of work and the plan that’s been produced. That, to me, is a duty. It is a duty; it is a public responsibility and anything less than that is a cop out.”
Recommendations to reduce the average sodium intake from about 3,400 mg per person per day to 2,300 mg by 2016 included: a consumer education campaign, a monitoring plan and public database to track if individual food products meet specific reduction targets, and new regulations to force companies to use uniform serving sizes in the nutritional fact on food packages and require industry calculations of a product’s percentage of recommended daily sodium consumption be based on a benchmark of 1,500 mg of sodium rather than the current 2,400 mg. Health Canada’s recommended daily intake level for sodium is 1,500 mg.
Aglukkaq has maintained she supports the goal of meeting the average sodium intake reduction target. She said Friday, however, that she doesn’t like the proposed way to achieve that goal.
Without the backing of the federal cabinet, the NDP will need the support of some Tory backbenchers to secure the bill’s passage. The Liberal caucus is expected to vote in favour of the bill, but the two opposition parties don’t have enough votes to get legislation passed in the House of Commons.
The bill calls for the creation of “a massive new bureaucracy called the Sodium Registry,” requiring a variety of companies – from family bakeries to restaurants – “to register with the government how much salt they put in their food,” Aglukkaq said in a statement Friday.
“Our government’s focus is on providing Canadians information they need to make healthy decisions for their families. The NDP’s priorities are: soft on crime and tough on potato chips.”
The private member’s bill, supported by the Canadian Medical Association and 40 other health groups and experts, is the latest move to press the federal government on the sodium file after Aglukkaq disbanded her own expert panel at the end of 2010, preventing it from setting up a monitoring system to track industry progress through 2016.
The Sodium Working Group pressed for action by citing research estimating that a decrease in the average sodium intake to about 1,800 mg per day would prevent 23,500 cardiovascular disease events every year, resulting in direct health-care savings of $1.38 billion per year. The panel also emphasized that an estimated 77 per cent of a person’s salt intake comes from processed foods and restaurant items.
Since Aglukkaq disbanded the group, companies have failed to provide progress data and Health Canada has not set up a public database for receiving and publishing it, says member Bill Jeffrey, national co-ordinator of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest.
Meanwhile, provinces called out the federal government last year for failing to follow through on commitments to reduce the sodium intake of Canadians when they released their own sodium strategy. The move came after Aglukkaq refused at the last minute to endorse a federal-provincial sodium-reduction plan at a health ministers in Halifax in November 2011.
Aglukkaq backed away from the plan, based on the recommendations of Sodium Working Group, because it would have singled out food companies for failing to meet specific sodium-reduction targets for individual products, and because the group stated that regulations should be considered if voluntary measures fail.
“This bill should not be necessary,” Dr. Hedy Fry, the Liberal health critic, said in the House of Commons to express her support for the bill.
Speaking on Aglukkaq’s behalf in the House of Commons, parliamentary secretary Colin Carrie called the bill “heavy handed” and cited a “major flaw” in it.
“Because it addresses processed foods, the NDP could spend millions on a sodium registry but Canadians who want choice can still pick that up and put the salt on their food,” said Carrie, referring to a salt shaker.
“That’s why our voluntary approach is better, especially with the education and the collaboration.”
