Senator Patrick Brazeau is at it again. After his bill, which would add cancer warning labels to alcohol cans and bottles, failed to pass before the last election, Brazeau reintroduced his legislation earlier this year and is trying to gain enough support from fellow senators to push the bill through the Senate.
Brazeau, who had a lengthy battle with alcohol addiction, says alcohol “does ruin lives” and he’s determined to do whatever it takes to scare Canadians away from consuming it. That includes using misleading data that overblows the incredibly marginal impact that consuming alcohol regularly has when it comes to being at risk of developing cancer.
The impact is so small, in fact, that it is nothing more than a rounding error. Data from the Canadian Centre for Substance Use and Addiction shows that consuming two alcoholic beverages per day increases one’s risk of getting cancer by 0.0099%.
Adding a cancer warning label to alcohol cans and bottles would do nothing more than distract and mislead consumers and make it extremely difficult to gain a sense of relative risk.
Requiring producers to slap a warning label on their cans and bottles is also culturally insensitive. When politicians talk of people who drink, they like to imagine cartoonishly ugly beer cans stacking up during a hockey game, but that’s hardly all there is to the consumption of alcohol. Beer, wine and spirits are an integral part of our cultural heritage. The Molson Coors brewery was created in 1786 and is thus 81 years older than the Confederation itself. In British Columbia, some vineyards have been producing continuously since the 1920s, with their original brands and logos. Covering them with a cigarette package-like warning label would devalue this cultural heritage.
And what will trade partners say? The reason that cancer warning label legislation in the European Union has not gone forward is that wine-producing countries like France heavily opposed the idea. The idea that Chateau de Goulaine in the Loire Valley, which has been making wine in the same kind of bottles with the same labels for the last 1,000 years, ought to add a cancer warning label to humour the Canadian Senate, is not just fanciful; it may very well violate the CETA EU-Canada trade agreement.
How would Canadians feel if maple syrup bottles were slapped with an “excessive consumption of sugar can lead to diabetes” warning, paired with a person whose feet have been amputated? Or what if Canadian dairy products needed to add “excessive dairy consumption leads to indigestion” next to the “100% Canadian milk” indication?
Alcohol warning label legislation isn’t the slippery slope theory; it’s the evidence that the slippery slope from cigarette warnings is real. Just as many food items aren’t healthy for consumers, the case will be made that they should be labelled. An inflation of labels will lead to the relativization of risk — after all, in the eyes of the average grocery shopper, if cigarettes cause cancer and alcohol causes cancer and candy causes cancer, can cigarettes really be this bad? That is, if consumers even register the label is there in the first place. A 2017 study using eye-tracking technology found that only 60% of consumers were aware of existing alcohol warning indications, and concludes that even if that number was 100%, that “awareness cannot be used to assess warning label effectiveness in isolation in cases where attention does not occur 100% of the time.” Or, in other words, seeing something thousands of times does not remotely mean you will act on a warning.
Brazeau deserves credit for getting sober and facing down his own personal demons. But that doesn’t mean the unfortunate experience of one senator should lead Canada to adopt a culturally insensitive policy that would anger our trading partners and mislead consumers. Senators should see Brazeau’s bill for what it is and vote to defeat it if it ultimately comes up for a vote.
Originally published here