Bitter Sweet

The sugar tax failed. Admit it.

Image: From a research report by Dr. Rachel Prowse and Dr. Scott Harding of Memorial University, funded by the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Did Andrew Furey’s sugar tax get people to drink fewer sugary soft drinks and switch to healthier drinks instead?

No.

That’s what the sugar tax was supposed to do: cut down on sales of drinks with added sugar and get them to switch instead to ones with less sugar.

Didn’t happen.

Didn’t cut the amount of sugar-sweetened drinks consumed.

Didn’t get people to switch to other drinks.

Massive and obvious and predictable policy failure.

We know th sugar tax didn’t work, thanks to research paid for by the Heart and Stroke Foundation that claims the tax worked despite the evidence. Not surprising though, given that the Foundation - as the Canadian Press correctly described last week - “supports sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, and … recommends all governments implement them.”

Let’s dig in, starting with the bit about people drinking less of the stuff with extra sugar in it:

“The average consumption of taxable [sugar-sweetened] beverages] in [Newfoundland and Labrador] was high before and after the NL SSB tax was implemented, nearly three litres per week.”

That sentence or a variation on it appears several times in both the summary and in the full report. On average, people drank about three litres of soft drinks a week before the tax and they drank the same amount after the tax.

So on Goal One, that would be a big zero for the Furey sugar tax.

Folks didn’t switch to healthier beverages either, as the image at the top of this column shows as well. It’s taken from the same research report.

Zip on Goal Two.

What’s worse, in Newfoundland and Labrador the sugar tax seems to have driven higher sales of soft drinks with artificial sweeteners. That brings its own health concerns that are as serious as sugar. Per person sales of so-called diet drinks went up 4.4% in Newfoundland and Labrador. Yet, sales of bottled water only went up 2.2%. Altogether, that’s only about half as much as sales of soft drinks fell so if folks switched drinks it wasn’t to anything healthier. Sales in every other category, including milk, plummeted.

Curiously enough, sales of milk and juices - generally healthier choices than soft drinks - fell by about twice as much as the drop in soft drink or pop sales. Milk and juice sales combined dropped a total of almost 22% compared to the drop of a little over 11% for the drinks targeted by the tax.

None of that gets any attention from the researchers. Instead, they focused on the drop in sales of one category of drink in Newfoundland and Labrador, which is not surprisingly the one they and the people who paid for the research are politically interested in the most.

New research revealed a 12% decline [they rounded up] in sales of sugary drinks one year after Newfoundland and Labrador implemented a tax on them, demonstrating the tax had an effect on reducing sugary drink purchases which may have long-term benefits for heart and brain health.

But that change doesn’t matter because, as the researchers noted, “there was a small decline in the total volume of sugar-containing beverages sold in NL, while the proportion remained largely unchanged in the Maritime provinces,” after Newfoundland and Labrador’s sugar tax cut in.

The small decline?

Three percent.

Barely noticeable.

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Despite there being no apparent change in consumption of soft drinks in Newfoundland and Labrador - about three litres per person per week - the researchers claimed victory for the sugar tax in the war on unhealthy eating. They also said the government killed the tax too early. Dr. Rachel Prowse, one of the co-authors of the Heart and Stroke Foundation research told Canadian Press that she thought “that it was premature to remove the tax based on public opinion, because [she hadn’t] seen any information that an evaluation was done.”

While there was a huge amount of space in the report given to supposed experience in other places with sugar taxes and an extensive discussion of advertising and pricing, Prowse and her colleagues didn’t spend any time on the sizeable and unexplained drop in consumption in the Maritimes for the same drinks as in Newfoundland and Labrador where there was no sugar tax in the Maritimes. No apparent concern either about the drop in consumption of healthier drinks - which matched the decline in Newfoundland and Labrador - or about the apparent switching to artificially-sweetened drinks that are arguably not any healthier than sugary ones.

These are not small issues, especially when Prowse, her co-author and the Heart and Stroke Foundation not only want the tax back, they want to see it raised. The tax obviously failed. We need to know why it failed. To make good policy, you need to know what’s going on. If you don’t know what’s driving behaviour, you cannot change it.

And there’s clearly something going on if there was a sizeable shift away from juice and milk and it happened in provinces regardless of whether or not there was any tax on sugar drinks. The sugar tax may well have had nothing to do with the changes these researchers showed. The notion there’s something else at play could be right since there’s no sign any changes in pricing or advertising by manufacturers had any impact on consumers in Newfoundland and Labrador either. In fact, there’s no evidence in the Heart and Stroke Research the sugar tax did anything at all that might not have happened otherwise.

That’s important to realize because from the start, there was very little reason to believe the sort of crude approach the provincial government took would have any real impact anyway. Anti-smoking campaigns and plastic shopping bag bans relied mainly on changes in public opinion to produce their effect, something researcher Prowse dismissed out of hand as unimportant.

As noted in the “Sugary Brain Farts” column a few years ago, we also know that the most sophisticated approach to reducing sugar in food didn’t work. The one in Newfoundland and Labrador was old-fashioned and crude by comparison. The British scheme taxed food-makers based on the amount of added sugar in their product so they would pay the price rather than pass it on to consumers. The British didn’t just hit soft drinks, they went after chocolate bars and candy and anything with added sugar beyond what you;d find naturally in the ingredients. The net impact was a drop of the equivalent of one can of soft drink per household per week and in some cases, consumption of products with added sugar went up as people sought their fix from products that now has less sugar than before the tax scheme started. Since the most sophisticated anti-sugar scheme couldn’t take out public demand for sugar, there was no chance the policy equivalent of a pop-gun would put a dent in it.

The evidence from other research comes up equally weak in favour of sugary drink taxes as this Heart and Stroke piece. A 2021 paper in the journal Social Science and Medicine, for example, found it “unclear what the effects of taxes on sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs) are on consumer behaviour and which consumers may be affected the most.” The researchers examined consumption in one Spanish province between 2016 and 2018. “Our results suggest a reduction in purchases of taxed beverages [2.2%] and a small increase in purchases of untaxed beverages” that also contained sugar. Basically, no impact worth noting.

The same shift of purchasing found in the United Kingdom for sugar and in Spain, incidentally, also mimics the shift in plastic bag purchases where demand for the product remained high. When some towns and cities in California banned plastic shopping bags - misrepresented as “single-use” by activists - consumers a simply bought more heavier plastic bags that were no more beneficial to the environment. If you want to change how much sugar people eat, you have to do way more than slap a puny tax on only some kinds of drinks. You have to change public attitudes that drive the behaviour.

This is now the second report by local researchers within a month that deals with serious public policy questions and offers essentially junk in place of insight. The first was research about public attitudes to police and public safety that was a textbook case of poor research design leading to completely useless results. GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

Now we’ve got a research report that ignores the evidence against the policy supported by the people who paid for the research and who conducted it, and then ignores other serious health policy questions from the data they did collect. And by the way, before you get too excited about the drop in soft drinks they reported, understand the researchers didn’t buy information on sales of all kinds of soft drinks. They left out fountain drinks, the ones people typically buy with fast food and that come in far larger sizes than the cans and bottles they focused on. Maybe the people who stopped buying cans of Pepsi upsized their Pepsi at Mary Browns instead and flew under the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s radar.

Basically, the sugar tax is is the same brain farty policy as the sign the City of St. John’s wants to stick up in Bannerman Park so people can take selfies (no idea of the cost so far), Muskrat Falls, the Churchill Falls give-away, wind energy, (we’ll look at CF 2 and wind later this week), or the townie council’s refusal to name streets after people any more.

And if you are still wondering how much provincial government policy in Newfoundland and Labrador comes from this kind of junk research and reporting, the answer is probably most if not all of it. Certainly, it’s more more than anyone should be happy about since it means that we waste an awful lot of our own money and time on nonsense and ignore serious problems we could do something about.

Sin Jawns: City of Legendary Bad Ideas

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