Proposed tax on sugary drinks gets lukewarm reception

If you love your sugary soft drinks, you might have felt a spasm of concern when the Heart and Stroke Foundation this week recommended a tax on any drinks with added sweeteners, known as free sugars.

It’s part of the foundation’s broad position statement on how to reduce Canadians’ unhealthy addiction to sugary foods. The foundation advocates taxing beverages and using that revenue to subsidize the purchase of healthy foods by people with lower incomes.

But you can rest easy and take a long pull on your super-sized soda. The Conservative government isn’t the least bit interested and the reaction of the opposition parties that hope to displace it in next year’s election is essentially a shrug.

Sugar, long a part of the nutritional access of evil among health professionals along with salt and saturated fats, has been targeted for increased attention recently.

The World Health Organization recommends no more than 10 per cent of daily calories should come from free sugars added to processed food and drink. The amount Canadians consume is about 13 per cent.

According to Statistics Canada, data from its 2004 Community Health Survey found Canadians consumed a daily average of 110 grams or 26 teaspoons of sugar, including the kind that appears naturally in food. It accounted for 21.4 per cent of their total daily calorie intake. The figure was highest among teenage boys, who downed 172 grams or 41 teaspoons a day.

The foundation’s proposed tax would be one element in a comprehensive approach to reduce sugar consumption, including addressing food portion sizes, reformulating products to contain less sugar, making drinking water more accessible, providing better nutritional labeling on food packages and improving public education.

Why single out pop, though? Well, drink one can and you’ve exceeded the recommended daily maximum of free sugars.

“We know that sugary drinks are the largest source of excess calories in our diet,” Lesley James, the foundation’s senior health policy analyst, told Yahoo Canada News. “They have loads of calories and no nutritional benefit. There really is no reason for people to be drinking sugary drinks.”

[ Related: Studies suggest guidelines advocating lower salt intake may need shaking up ]

The tax would not be levied directly on the price of that can of pop, said James. It would be imposed either on the manufacturer or distributor.

“So it’s kind of up to the retailer and the manufacturer how that gets passed on to consumers,” she said Wednesday.

James said similar sugar taxes are in place in several European countries. Mexico began taxing sugary drinks last January, resulting in a 10 per cent reduction in sales and a seven per cent increase in consumption of untaxed alternatives.

A sugar tax would not be unprecedented here, she said.

“This government has used taxation to reduce consumption of tobacco and they recognize the effectiveness of using taxes to change consumption patterns,” said James.

But the tax seems to be a non-starter on Parliament Hill. Health Canada, in a statement sent to Yahoo Canada News congratulated the foundation on its work and emphasized the need for Canadians to reduce consumption. It also promised improved product labeling that would spell out the its percentage of the daily value of total sugars and group ingredients so it’s easier to spot added sugars.

But the statement said nothing about the tax. A spokesman referred the question to Finance Canada, which was more blunt.

“While we encourage healthy lifestyles, our government firmly believes that Canadians pay enough taxes – and they do not need to be forced to pay any more,” Finance Minister Joe Oliver said in an emailed statement via a spokesman. “We have said before that when we emerge from deficit we will cut taxes for Canadian families.”

The tax is also getting scant support from the opposition.

Liberal health critic Hedy Fry, herself a doctor, said a tax on bad foods is a good idea in theory.

“However, where ever it’s been tried, evidence has shown that it hasn’t achieved the result,” she said in an interview.

For example, Denmark imposed a tax on foods high in saturated fats in 2011, only to rescind it a year later because of widespread avoidance. Danes simply drove to neighbouring Germany or Sweden to stock up on fatty favourites like butter, cheese and oil. A planned flat tax on sugar was also scrapped before it was implemented, according to the British Medical Journal.

The Liberals are looking for evidence-based policies, said Fry.

“If it [a tax] is shown it works in real life, in practice, this would be something that we would be prepared to look at,” the Vancouver MP said. “But currently evidence shows that it doesn’t work.”

NDP health critic Libby Davies, incidentally also a Vancouver MP like Fry, praised the foundation’s work to promote healthy eating but played down the tax recommendation.

“This is not something we have considered, and it would need to be discussed and looked at,” she said in an email from Edmonton, where the party caucus was meeting.

Both Davies and Fry attacked the Conservative government for not doing more to foster better food labeling and restrict the amount of added sugar and salt manufacturers can put in processed foods, as some European countries have done.

The ambivalence about the tax is not surprising to Ian Culbert, executive director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Public Health Association.

“The thing that we know in public health is that there aren’t any silver bullets,” he said in an interview.

Changing Canadians’ eating habits is a far bigger challenge than making some foods more expensive, he said.

“We can draw the parallel to the war on tobacco,” said Culbert. “Taxing the product had an impact but at the end of the day it’s not really what made the difference. You had a societal change that took years.”

[ Related: How to Ditch the Sugar Habit ]

Quick and easy processed foods, inevitably high in salt and sugar, have been woven into families’ busy lifestyles. They’re also cheaper than many fresh foods, making them attractive to those on lower incomes.

““We know that consumption of these products is highest in the lowest economic strata,” said Culbert. “They have the perception of fewer choices.”

Part of the challenge involves weaning ourselves off our acquired taste for overly sweet and salty foods, he said. Europeans eat many of the same brand-name processed products we do but theirs are formulated with less sugar and sodium.

“It is the evolution of the North American palate that is also part of the problem,” said Culbert. “We’re talking about human behaviour here. People like sweet, salty food and to change that overnight will backfire.”

Part of the answer lies in people reacquiring an understanding of food, he said, noting the Ontario Home Economics Association recently advocated reintroducing food education courses in schools.

“The generational transfer about knowledge in food has been broken,” said Culbert. “You’re finding young Canadians who don’t know how to boil an egg.That disconnect from our food is getting worse and worse.”