By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Rogers Media and Corus Entertainment have renewed their lobby registrations with a topic once thought passed its best-before date: junk food advertising restrictions.
In 2016, Senate Bill S-228 was introduced as an amendment to the Food and Drugs Act with the goal of severely restricting the ability of advertisers to market unhealthy food and drinks to children in an effort to fight obesity. Rogers, Bell and Corus began lobbying on the issue, with the latter warning that severely limiting TV advertising of these types of products from between 6 and 9 a.m. and 3 and 9 p.m. on weekdays and 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekends would injure the already suffering traditional TV industry.
After stalling in the Senate, the proposed legislation died before the election. CBC reported last year that it faced aggressive lobbying from powerful industries that likely rung its death knell.
But the issue has since resurfaced, this time straight from the Prime Minister’s office. In his December mandate letter following the Liberal’s win in the October election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Minister of Health Patty Hajdu to make every effort to “promote healthy eating, including continuing work to introduce new restrictions on the commercial marketing of food and beverages to children and establishing new front-of-package labelling.”
Last month, Rogers and Corus broadened their respective lobby files as an update to previous registrations that included Bill S-228 to include any policies that relate generally to the marketing of unhealthy food and beverage products. As of January 6th, however, Bell removed any reference to that topic in its lobby files. Bell did not respond to a question about whether it plans to reintroduce the issue in its files.
Other players who have lobbied consistently on the issue include the National Hockey League and the Association of Canadian Advertisers, which, in helping establish the Advertising Standards of Canada, has been pushing for a self-regulatory approach.
Corus had said that the proposed approach in Bill S-228 was too broad and preferred a more targeted approach, such as having a CRTC framework to identify children’s TV programming and limiting unhealthy food and drink advertising during those programs – instead of entire chunks of the day. It also said the Bill’s proposal to target online advertising would be difficult to regulate and highlighted that there are existing rules for advertising that the CRTC administers and which broadcasters follow.
A 2017 Health Canada consultation report found that parties expressed a desire to lessen children’s exposure to advertisements of unhealthy products.
