2021 federal election priorities - oneveryshelf.ca

2021 Federal Election

Priorities

Canadians have diverse opinions, backgrounds, and lives, but we have so much in common when it comes to the products we rely on every day. From morning routines to school bake sales to sick days at home to family gatherings, we find ourselves reaching for the trusted brands and depend-able products that are fixtures in our daily lives. These are the products Food, Health & Consumer Products of Canada (FHCP) members are proud to make.

FHCP members feed and care for Canada. We turn Canada’s crops and farm goods into the finished products that fill every grocery and drug store shelf across Canada. We help Canadians decrease time spent waiting in doctors’ offices, help support our healthcare system, connect our urban and rural communities, and so much more.

We also fuel Canada’s economy, contributing more than $39.9 billion to Canada’s GDP every year. FHCP represents the nation’s largest manufac-turing workforce, employing more than 350,000 Canadians and operating in every province. We provide good jobs for Canadians; lucrative, reliable markets for Canadian farmers; and a secure supply of food, health, and consumer products that keep our country resilient and self-reliant.

As the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, Canada’s resilience and self-reliance depend on both robust domestic manufacturing and global supply chains for essential products. Food, health, and consumer product manufacturing have a unique capacity to power Canada’s post-COVID recovery. Strength-ening our sector will ensure Canadians can continue to find the products they need at prices they can afford, as well as power much-needed invest-ment, innovation, jobs, and growth.

We cannot achieve this ambitious vision of a stronger, more resilient Can-ada without the support of government as a proactive, engaged partner committed to the future of this vital sector.

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Introduction

FEDERAL ELECTION PRIORITIES

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75%

The food, health and consumer goods sector is at the heart of healthy homes, healthy communities, and a healthy Canada

INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT

Yet, the sector faces major constraints that limit our full potential as a critical driver for Canada’s growth and resilience

Canada must urgently course-correct to attract investment, create jobs, secure supplies of food and essential goods, and support growth

Help secure Canada’s supply of food, health, and consumer products every day and especially in times of crisis

117 manufacturing members

$40+ billion

28,000+

20%

2x

$37+ billion

More than 350,000 employees

2025

The sector supports the most manufacturing jobs in Canada and supports good-paying jobs in urban and rural communities

addedto GDP

through exports

The sector drives value and growth in Canada’s economy

140,000+ regulations at the federal level alone, urgent need to streamline and modernize

Unfilled jobs due to labour and skills gaps

increase in production costs since 2012, while staying flat in

the United States

FHCP is leading to make all packaging recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025, in line with

the MacArthur Foundation’s Vision for a New Plastics Economy

Consolidated retail power, unfair practices harm

suppliers & consumers

higher rate of abandoning consumer health product innovations compared

to Australia, EU, USA

of food/consumer goodsmembers don’t plan to expand

production in Canada

5 retailers, 80% of sales

Losing investment & innovation

10,000locationssector-wide support

communities in every province

Nearly


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Recognized as a key strategic sector for post-pan-demic recovery, the food, health, and consumer prod-ucts industry is keen to play a critical role. However, we face significant challenges in Canada.

In our 2019 Perception Audit, leading executives from across the sector expressed concern about Canada’s high cost of doing business, regulatory burden, labour shortage, and lack of support for innovation. Over-coming these challenges is more important than ever as the economy emerges from the pandemic.

FHCP member companies reported that:

• 95 per cent of companies say the retail environ-ment negatively impacts price and choice for Canadians

• 90 per cent of companies say the regulatory com-pliance burden impacts competitiveness

• 90 per cent of companies say government must do more to attract investment and encourage Canadian manufacturing

• 85 per cent of manufacturers cannot fill vacancies

• 78 per cent of companies find the cost of doing business is increasing faster in Canada than in other countries

• Nearly 50 per cent are looking to invest else-where, while only 25 per cent of companies intend to expand production in Canada

To compete globally, industry and government need to work collaboratively to foster innovation, attract in-vestment and grow domestic manufacturing capacity through targeted support and improved competitive-ness.

Strengthencompetitiveness and supportinnovation

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Regulatory BurdenFood, health, and consumer product manufacturers face unprecedented and monumental changes to how they make, package and sell products. To fuel econom-ic recovery, there is an urgent need for improved policy alignment across government. Economic and regulato-ry departments need to better coordinate design and implementation of policies and regulations.

Critical regulatory decisions are currently made with-out sufficient consideration of business impacts, pro-ducing unnecessarily burdensome, disjointed and in-consistent policies across government; undermining regulatory objectives and the country’s post-pandemic economic recovery.

For example, in its April 2021 report on Natural Health Products (NHPs), the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) found that more than half of NHPs obtained on-line contained label information that was not compli-ant with Canada’s regulatory requirements. The OAG recommended Health Canada prioritize enforcement to remove unsafe products that could affect the 75 per cent of Canadians who use NHPs.

Instead, Health Canada is prioritizing burdensome new regulations that will micromanage font sizes and label formatting, forcing law-abiding Canadian manufactur-ers to waste an estimated $300-500 million on card-board boxes and paper labels that end up in the garbage bin. These new regulations will do nothing to improve consumers’ safety and leave Canadian products even less able to compete with non-compliant companies.

A similarly flawed “plain language” labelling mandate on over-the-counter medicines (OTCs) eliminated ap-proximately one in six OTC products from the market.

FHCP strongly supports regulations based on science and evidence that prioritize health, safety, and sus-tainability while leveraging technological solutions and incentivizing innovation and growth. It is time for Can-ada to legislate that Canadian health, environment and other regulators must consider efficiency, cost-effec-tiveness, and evidence of benefits as critical to fulfilling their regulatory mandates.

LabourThe food, health, and consumer products industry fac-es critical labour and skills gaps. Almost one in ten food manufacturing vacancies remains unfilled - leav-ing 28,000 jobs vacant. Industry and government need to work together to expand the scope of programs to re-skill disrupted workers, retain and attract highly skilled global talent, provide predictable and timely ac-cess to workers outside of Canada to fill the current domestic labour gap, and make investments supporting the commercialization of labour-saving technologies.

PlasticsThe food, health and consumer products industry is committed to working with governments and partners across the country to advance a circular economy for plastics. The industry has made significant commit-ments and investments to ensuring plastic does not become waste.

Current and proposed regulatory frameworks related to plastics and product stewardship will negatively im-pact competitiveness if not supported by public invest-ments and supports for innovations of new packaging materials, recycling technologies and infrastructure capacity. Industry and government collaboration and comprehensive supports will keep plastics in the econ-omy but out of the environment, create new domestic jobs, reduce emissions, and eliminate value lost from unrecovered materials.

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The negative impacts of Canada’s consolidated grocery retail landscape threaten the food, health and consum-er products manufacturing sector’s competitiveness and long-term growth. Five companies control more than 80 per cent of grocery and drug store sales while the largest supplier represents less than three (3) per cent of a large retailer’s volume.

These grocery giants have used this power imbalance to unilaterally impose fees and raise costs on suppliers, contributing to massive increases in the cost of doing business with no return on investment or growth for manufacturers and no value in reduced prices or inno-vation for consumers.

These unfair practices pose a serious threat to the food, health and consumer products manufacturing sector in Canada, as well as primary (farmers) and secondary suppliers to the sector.

In 2020, Abacus Data revealed that a large majority of Canadians feel that having a small number of com-peting grocery chains results in grocery prices being higher than necessary and that greater balance in the country’s food supply chain is needed.1

In the same poll, 89 per cent of Canadians agreed that it is important Canada has a strong domestic food supply

1 &2: Abacus Data, Testing appetite for a grocery code of conduct. Conducted on behalf of the Dairy Processors Association of Canada September 23-29, 2020.

Implement a Grocery Supply Code of Practice

chain that does not rely on products made and grown in other countries. other countries.2

When similar dynamics threatened its food and grocery supply, the UK implemented a Grocery Supply Code of Practice with a dedicated enforcement agency, which has proven to be the most effective model in restor-ing balance and fairness to the relationship between grocery retailers and their suppliers, while keeping food price inflation low.

In March, FHCP and Empire proposed a legislated Grocery Supply Code of Practice for Canada. The first of its kind, it is based on shared principles of fair deal-ing, transparency, and equity. Similar to the UK model, our code is between large retailers and manufacturers, where most issues reside. We believe our proposed Grocery Code can be a blueprint for Canada.

More than three-quarters (77 per cent) of Canadians support government action to encourage food suppli-ers and grocers to adopt a Grocery Code of Conduct in Canada.

Canada needs to implement a Grocery Supply Code of Practice to restore balance in the grocery retailer- supplier relationship.

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People are Canada’s greatest healthcare resource, but their potential is often underestimated and undervalued compared to the publicly funded healthcare system. The government should support self-care tools, information, products and ser-vices that help Canadians make healthy lifestyle choices, treat minor health ailments, manage or prevent chronic diseases and more.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the vital impor-tance of self-care. It has shown us that, while supporting our healthcare systems should be our top priority, health literacy and self-care behaviours are our first line of defence in public health emergencies and will play a key role in their outcome. At this unique moment, there is no better time to promote the potential social and economic benefits of practising self-care and to reflect on lessons learned from the pandemic.

According to recent polling conducted by Abacus Data on be-half of FHCP, there is broad public support for a National Self-Care Strategy. Abacus polling revealed that 95 per cent of Canadians believe they need more tools to practice self-care and a strong, resilient healthcare system for when they can’t.

With self-care widely seen as a tool to support and reduce costs within our healthcare systems, 87 per cent of Canadians think it is a good idea for the federal government to develop a National Self-Care Strategy. In fact, the concept of a National Self-Care Strategy enjoys wide-ranging and cross-partisan support across regional and demographic groups in Canada.

Earlier this year, FHCP presented a Blueprint for a Na-tional Self-Care Strategy, which includes four main areas of focus: building the foundation for a National Self-Care Strate-gy, regulating to maximize the benefits of self-care supporting competitiveness and incentivizing innovation, and supporting Canadians to practice self-care.

Canada has an opportunity to make self-care a cornerstone of health care and emerge from the pandemic stronger than before.

Canada needs to implement a National Self-Care Strategy to increase Canadians’ capacity to take care of themselves; save time, money, and resources; and make our public-ly-funded health care system more sustainable.

Implement a National Self-Care Strategy

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Our members

About us

Our Members (April 20, 2021)

Our Members (April 20, 2021)

FHCP is the voice of Canada’s largest manufacturing employer. The food, health, and consumer products sector employs more than 350,000 Canadians across businesses of all sizes that manufacture and distribute the safe, high-quality products that are at the heart of healthy homes, healthy communities, and a healthy Canada.

For more information, please visit www.OnEveryShelf.ca.

2021 federal election priorities - oneveryshelf.ca

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