Canada’s Cancer Label Fight Puts the Alcohol Industry on Notice

What’s happening in Ottawa could set the tone for global labelling battles

If Canada passes Bill S-202, every bottle of beer, wine and whisky could soon carry a cancer warning.

The bill, re-introduced by Senator Patrick Brazeau after dying in the last election, would put tobacco-style labels on alcohol.

Cancer warnings don’t just deter drinkers — they shift public opinion. Once people see a cancer label, they become far more open to taxes, ad bans, and sales restrictions.

And if one country adopts it, campaigners elsewhere can say: “They did it — why can’t we?”

For alcohol control advocates, cancer labels are a lottery win.

Yesterday, senators listened to four leading witnesses speak in favour of the Bill.

The Ottawa Parliament/Shubham Sharan on Unsplash

The European test case

First up was Sheila Gilheany, CEO of Alcohol Action Ireland, who traced Ireland’s campaign to add cancer warnings to alcohol.

In 2018, Ireland passed what she called “modest measures,” including minimum pricing and advertising restrictions. The proposed labels warned that alcohol causes liver disease and fatal cancers, included a pregnancy pictogram, calorie and alcohol content, and a link to a public-health website.

“That legislation went through regulatory processes within the European Union and, at the end of a six month process, the EU Commission decided that Ireland’s labelling requirements did not constitute a barrier to trade,” she went on.

The regulations then went to the World Trade Organisation, were defended by the EU, and were signed into law in 2023, “with a start date of May 2026”.

“We strongly believe that the consumer has a right to know about the risks from alcohol,” she said. “Unfortunately, there is a low level of public knowledge. Here in Ireland, recent research indicates that less than four in 10 people are aware of the link between alcohol and cancer.”

She accused the alcohol industry of “consistently seeking to obscure or downplay cancer risks,” noting that producers had coordinated their submissions during the EU review.

She also managed to say “the industry” seven times in under five minutes.

What she didn’t mention was that at least nine EU member states filed objections, and more than a dozen raised concerns overall.

At the WTO, the US argued the labels would not only restrict trade but also lacked sufficient scientific consensus. Australia raised questions about proportionality; while a number argued that Irish-specific labels would be a barrier to trade.

After all that, the labels have been pushed back to September 2028 because of a wider US-EU trade dispute, where the US flagged the labels as a concern.

Gilheany noted that, since April 2025, dozens of brands already carry the new labels. She said they are easy to apply, because if producers don’t add them, retailers can just use a sticker.

The WHO reiterates there’s No Safe Amount

Next came Catherine Paradis, a Technical Officer at WHO Europe and former researcher at Canada’s CCSA, who framed Bill S-202 as fully aligned with WHO recommendations.

In Europe, she said, alcohol causes about 656 deaths a day and costs €4.6 billion a year in lost productivity. “There is no safe amount of alcohol for cancer.”

Paradis said the WHO’s recommended ‘Best Buy’ policies, including taxes, ad limits and restricted availability, only work once the public understands alcohol’s risks, which is why labelling matters.

She also dismissed QR codes as a diversion; half link to marketing sites, few are ever scanned, and, as she put it, “QR codes serve commercial interests, not public health”.

A study of 20,000 people across 14 EU countries found that cancer warnings increased knowledge and cut consumption “across all sociodemographic groups”.

Cancer warnings, she concluded, are “noticed, understood, retained”.

Canada’s turn at the microphone

Dr Tim Naimi, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Research, also served on the scientific committees that shaped both Canadian and US drinking guidelines.

He held up a can of green peas and pointed out that its label listed everything from the serving size and the ingredients to the calories.

“I’m quite confident that if these green peas were a Group 1 carcinogen or the leading preventable cause of intellectual disability among Canadian youth, or that if one in four people who begin eating green peas were to develop an addiction in their lifetime, the label would probably say that, too.”

Then Naimi held up a bottle. “This fine whiskey, sourced from my own stash, claims it’s ‘smooth and oaky’,” he said. “Beyond that, it tells you only that it’s 40% alcohol. What does that even mean to consumers? There’s no mention that alcohol causes cancer, no serving-size information, no count of standard drinks — which in this case is 17 — and no ingredients or drinking guidelines.”

Naimi, an American, reminded senators that the US has required health information on alcohol labels for nearly forty years and then appealed to national pride. “Canada,” he said, “you’re better than the US”.

​​He said the alcohol industry had been “lobbying furiously,” and reminded senators that the Canadian government’s duty extends beyond promoting commerce to protecting citizens’ health.

He added that Canadian taxpayers “bear almost 33 cents per standard drink in excess costs compared to the tax revenue alcohol generates”.

“Canadians have a right to know basic information,” he said

He concluded with a clear warning to policymakers: “An industry’s duty to inform isn’t just moral. It’s a legal one — and there’s a growing movement to hold governments accountable for failing to disclose even the most basic facts about alcohol.”

The Yukon study that rattled the industry

Tim Stockwell opened with the numbers.

“Our best estimates are that over 3,000 Canadians die each year from alcohol-related cancers, and over 20,000 people are admitted to hospital with alcohol-caused cancers,” he said.

His preferred prop was a bottle of cannabis product bearing a health warning, which he used to contrast the two intoxicants and their labelling standards.

But most of his time, both in his remarks and during questions, was spent on the Yukon label study, which he co-led.

The Yukon Cancer Warning Label Study ran from 2017 to 2018 at two liquor stores in Whitehorse, Canada. Researchers attached bright yellow stickers to bottles stating, “Alcohol can cause cancer, including breast and colon cancers,” alongside two other rotating warnings about standard drinks and low-risk guidelines.

Within a month, alcohol industry associations threatened legal action, prompting the government to remove the labels.

Stockwell said the public were outraged at the alcohol industry’s interference. “It’s the strongest support for alcohol policy positions I’ve ever experienced.”

Follow-up surveys later showed that the warnings had significantly increased public awareness of alcohol’s health risks.

When Stockwell appeared on the (award-winning!) Drinks Insider podcast, he said the government ended the study because it didn’t have the funds to take on the alcohol industry in court.

The study found a 6% drop in overall alcohol sales during the month the labels were in place; when I asked him who drank less, he said there was “some evidence that the heavier drinkers were less responsive to the label”.

In other words, labels convince the moderate drinkers, not the heavy ones.

What Health Canada didn’t do

The senators appeared engaged and largely sympathetic to the witnesses.

Senator Brazeau, who credited the witnesses with inspiring the bill, noted that “the two Dr Tims” had made numerous recommendations to Health Canada that were never adopted, and asked why “Health Canada is on idle right now with respect to alcohol policy?”

The CCSA, where Stockwell and Dr Naimi collaborated, was charged with reviewing Canada’s low-risk drinking guidelines. When it concluded that only two drinks a week were safe, the backlash was immediate. Health Canada acknowledged the report but left its 2011 drinking guidelines unchanged.

Stockwell passed the question to Dr Naimi, who said it “would be best left to Health Canada,” but added that “Health Canada lives in a political infrastructure as well, and it’s susceptible also to heavy industry lobbying.”

(My speculation: maybe it also doesn’t like being mocked in the media, which it was.)

Another question was whether warning labels should differ across alcohol categories — wine, beer, or spirits — or be uniform.

“I think it’s very important for the committee to understand that it’s not a specific type of beverage that causes cancer,” said Paradis. “It’s ethanol, whether it comes in the form of beer, spirits, or wine. There is no need to have different warnings for different types of beverages.”

The next round

Much of the remaining discussion focused on the alcohol industry’s lobbying power before Senator Rosemary Moodie, a physician and the committee’s chair, brought the session to a close. Opponents of the Bill will testify at the next hearing.

In the meantime, if you want to know what those opposed have already said in the media, you’ll find the discussion here, here and here.

After the newsletter went out, I heard from people in Canada: Bill S-202 is a Senate public bill, introduced to advance debate rather than a government measure likely to pass into law. Its progress nonetheless signals growing political interest in mandatory health labelling.

Photo by Paolo Bendandi on Unsplash

What’s in your drinks cupboard?

A few weeks ago, Lulie Halstead and I asked people to confess to what was lurking at the back of their drinks cupboards.

The results are in! And it turns out that some of the world’s top drinks professionals have sticky bottles full of sediment at the back of their cupboards.

We discovered:

🔥 What drinks are most likely to end up unloved
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We talk about what we discovered on this week’s episode of A Question of Drinks. It’s a story of optimism, creativity, and really terrible choices.

You can hear it here or here.