Professor Tim Stockwell:

I thank the Chairman. I meant to talk through these slides but I will skip through them because I know that time is of the essence. I have been invited to talk to the joint committee about Canadian alcohol policies. I may not sound Canadian but I have been living there and working at the University of Victoria for ten years. There is a large group of us there with interests in public health, safety and order, looking at the impact of pricing and other policies. Canada is one of the few countries in the world that has minimum pricing. Four years ago, we decided to look for the first time - no one had done this before - at what some of the impact was of this policy which is being actively considered in the British Isles, Ireland and some European countries as well.
Looking at the map of Canada, alcohol policy of this kind is determined provincially. We have ten provinces and they all have some kind of minimum pricing, in some cases dating back to the 1920s. Generally, it was not introduced for reasons of health, safety or order but for purely financial ones. Minimum pricing is strongly supported by local industry groups because it gives a regulated, predictable market and protects profit margins.
Each province goes about this differently, which is good from a research viewpoint. We have access to good data. I will skip through the slide which gives four examples of minimum pricing to give committee members an idea of how this works. The simplest and probably the least effective kind has been introduced in the United Kingdom, which is not to allow alcohol to be sold below cost. One can still discount and not have any profit from it but one cannot give it away. That has limited effectiveness and does not really affect many products.
Some of the US states fix a minimum profit or mark-up whereby the distribution of alcohol is Government controlled. It is slightly more effective.
In Canada, we do not have minimum unit pricing, with one possible exception. It is mainly putting a floor price per litre of beverage. It would not matter if it was 74% strength Captain Morganrum or a 2% beer; it would be the same minimum price per litre of drink. As it is the ethanol that does the harm from a public health, safety and order perspective, that is not very efficient.
Scotland is proposing to have a precise minimum price set for a unit of alcohol. That is important for whether people get too drunk and are more likely to commit offences or harm themselves through drinking too much over many years. That is just in legislation and we are awaiting the outcome of various legal processes and challenges.
As regards the rationale, scientists looking at this area have known for many years that pricing is the most effective policy when one compares all the different options for a range of problems, whether they are crime, health or harmful drinking patterns. It is hard for most people to believe that. I am well aware that when I make that statement, several members of the committee may say that is not right. They may ask how increasing the price could affect the drinking of a heavy drinker.
Systematic studies of the entire published literature on this subject indicate that, on average, a 10% increase in the price of alcohol leads to a 5% drop in consumption. That is also significant for the outcomes. In addition, price increases have a direct impact on health and crime outcomes. Minimum pricing is just one variation of it.
There are theoretical reasons, which I will touch on, that I think it should be more effective than pricing across the board because it is more targeted. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that heavier drinkers and younger drinkers gravitate towards cheaper alcohol. Cheap alcohol therefore is a particular problem where harm and excessive patterns are concerned. Minimum pricing is setting a floor below which one cannot go.
We know from studies in Scandinavia that if one changes the price of a cheap drink, the response is much greater than if one changes the price of a more expensive drink. Putting those two things together, theoretically one should have a powerful variation.
I would like members of the joint committee to look at this slide which gives examples of some of the studies that have shown a relationship between changes in price or tax and deaths from alcohol. They could be violent deaths, poisonings or various liver diseases. This shows the numbers of alcohol-related deaths in Alaska over a 30 year period and the shock of two big tax increases which reduced those deaths immediately. People think that drinkers will find substitute duty-free, home-made, non-beverage sources to compensate. If they did that, however, one would not get this effect because the net effect on harm is so significant.
I want to focus on some results and will move to the slide about research findings starting with the question of whether minimum pricing reduces consumption. I will cite some case studies, first of all from Saskatchewan, which is one of the prairie provinces. Saskatchewan is important-----