A House of Commons committee is expected to recommend in early June that the Conservative government quickly amend the rules that govern “product of Canada” labels to increase the requirement for Canadian content.
When members of the Commons agriculture committee meet May 27 and 29 to write a report after weeks of public hearings, they also will debate whether it is practical to suggest that “product of Canada” labels require some minimum percentage of Canadian food product to qualify.
They are expected to recommend that as much as 80 percent of the cost of a product must be incurred in Canada before it can be tagged with the label. At present, 51 percent of the cost of the product must be incurred in Canada and none of it needs to be Canadian-grown food.
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As MPs heard repeatedly, it can lead to imported food being processed and packaged in Canada and then labelled “product of Canada.”
MPs from all parties say they want to end this confusion and misleading advertising.
“Over the past month or so, we’ve heard a lot of things,” Liberal Paul Steckle said May 8 as hearings ended.
“One theme remained consistent, that people should have the right to know and they should have the right to know that the information that they believe to be true is actually true.”
Conservative Larry Miller said he will argue that packaging costs should not be included in the label guideline.
“One thing that has been made very clear to me and this committee is that using any part of the package as part of determining ‘product of Canada’ is no longer acceptable,” he said. “I think that’s definitely where we start.”
MPs almost certainly will recommend that any changes to label rules be done by government order rather than a regulatory change that would take months.
That was the strong recommendation of former Canadian Food Inspection Agency president Ron Doering, now an Ottawa-based food law lawyer, when he appeared before the committee May 6.
He said an order by the agriculture minister to CFIA to increase Canadian content requirements above 51 percent could be done almost instantly without the need for long consultations and hearings.
Doering said the committee should steer clear of raising the Canadian content requirement to 100 percent because many companies produce a product that is not always available in sufficient quantities in Canada, requiring some imported product.
“Any product whose ingredients are 80 percent of Canadian origin and for which all the processing, manufacturing, additions were done in Canada, that should be ‘product of Canada,’ ” he said.
Doering also said the Canadian Federation of Agriculture should stop lobbying government for help in establishing a voluntary “grown in Canada” label and organize it themselves.
