[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Wednesday, May 31, 1995
.1543 
[English]
The Chairman: Good afternoon, members of the Sub-committee on HIV/AIDS of the Standing Committee on Health.
This afternoon we have as a witness, from Molson Breweries Limited, Mr. Charles Fremes, senior vice-president of corporate and public affairs. He's going to talk to us regarding private sector HIV/AIDS fund-raising.
[Translation]
The floor is yours.
[English]
Mr. Charles Fremes (Senior Vice-President, Corporate and Public Affairs, Molson Breweries Limited): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the invitation to appear.
I have a presentation to take you through very quickly today, which is an overview of the work Molson has done on the AIDS issue. I should say at the outset that the presentation was not prepared for this committee. You're not the audience.
At the request of several AIDS organizations across Canada, the presentation was prepared by Molson to talk to businesses and community organizations about what Molson has learned through its work on its Partners in the Fight Against AIDS program. Rather than come in here and make a presentation to parliamentarians, who already know a great deal about the issue, I'm going to do what I do best, which is repeat the presentation I make to private sector companies in this country.
Without naming names, large banks, large manufacturing companies and large service organizations have invited us to talk to them about what Molson does in the area of HIV/AIDS and why. That's what I intend to take you through very quickly today, and with a little bit of help from the technology, I'll show you some examples of the work we've done.
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[Slide Presentation]
Mr. Fremes: We've called this presentation ``Why AIDS? Why Us? Why Now?'' As I said, one of the things we have to do when we're invited by companies to talk about what Molson is doing on the AIDS issue is explain right away what a company that's used to being thought of as involved in entertainment, rock and roll, hockey, alcoholic beverages, motor sports and international exports is doing in the area of AIDS at all.
That is how consumers in this country usually think of us, so one of the first questions asked when we're talking to business audiences across the country is ``What are you, a company that stands for all of this and is associated in consumers' minds with all of this, doing with HIV/AIDS in the first place?''
Because we're frequently talking to people from the marketing discipline in corporations, who are interested in their image and in their involvement in community issues, we have to go back a step before we go forward a step. I'm sure some of the information I'm about to present to you is old hat, but I did say this is the presentation we give to businesses in this country, so I want to take you through it very quickly.
We start out by telling them we have done a fair bit of research, both desk research and our own proprietary custom research, on the issue. We've looked at studies that actually have been subsidized and financed by Health Canada. We are a subscriber to The Goldfarb Report, which talks about consumer attitudes and opinions. We've talked to a number of organizations and agencies in the United States. We frequently have been asked to make this presentation to U.S. companies and organizations.
We talk about some very fundamental facts about HIV/AIDS. The first, which I'm sure you know, is it's the fastest-growing cause of death among men aged 25 to 44 in the United States since the early 1980s, and Canadian cases have risen in a similar manner. We go back through the fact that it's now the number two cause of death for all men in Toronto.
We touch on the fact that there are several kinds of costs associated with the issue: first is the human cost, second are the direct economic costs, and third are the indirect economic costs. What do we mean by that? A study financed by the government for the Yokohama world conference on AIDS quantified the lost earnings due to AIDS in this country at between $1.4 billion and $2.6 billion.
When we're talking to business people in this country about our involvement and the rationale for it, we start out talking in their language, if you will - talking about the economic impact of this disease.
The next area we get into, because they don't know this, is how the community has responded to the AIDS epidemic in this country. It grew gradually in the early 1980s, from a bunch of committed volunteers working in a range of community and social service organizations. The number of volunteers now estimated by the Canadian AIDS Society is about 10,000 per year.
Just think of what that quantifies out as in contribution. At about a million hours donated a year by these volunteers and at just $10 an hour, we're already talking about an annual voluntary contribution of $10 million by the voluntary sector. That effort is going on every day in this country for AIDS education, research and care.
The other thing businesses like to see is consumer and market research. If they're going to be associated with an issue, they want to know how the public will react to it. Our data shows that generally health and medical issues have been moving to the top of the agenda in terms of where Canadians would like to see corporations giving their philanthropic dollars. Education, medical research and scientific events are right at the top, and down at the bottom are sports, entertainment and arts and cultural organizations.
It would be too simplistic to make all of your conclusions based on one slide, but it gives you a kind of idea of where Canadians sense the priorities are. As people involved in the public policy debate, I would think this is not too big a stretch for you. You know from your own constituents and from what's being fed back that Canadians are thinking more and more about the quality of education and the quality of health care in this country. Frankly, they are looking at government and other support for arts and cultural organizations as ``nice to haves'' as opposed to ``need to haves''. This is a proxy of that kind of finding, I think.
One of the things you hear about the AIDS issue - and what you have to get right on the table when you're talking to a business audience in this country - is that it really is just a marginal issue. It's not a mainstream issue in this country. What a business might say is ``It only affects a few people, so why should I worry about it?''
The fact is if you look at the data from The Goldfarb Report - a very legitimate, quantitative study that's been tracking Canadians' attitudes for fifteen years in this country - AIDS has been in the top five out of fifty concerns in Canada four years running.
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A couple of things about that chart. The first is that in the top five or six, they're all economic issues, except AIDS. We know that Canadians are concerned about the economy; they're concerned about unemployment, taxes, spending, and debt. It's only AIDS that ranks in the top five or six issues in this country. It's the only public health issue that gets on the national radar screen.
We think that's extremely important, both as a company that has a history of communicating and being involved in community donations, and also as a large marketer.
A second way of looking at it, in looking at the data, is if you ask Canadians if they agree or disagree with the statement that anyone can get AIDS. This is another way of looking at whether we see it as a mainstream issue in this country or as a marginal issue.
You see a growth in the number of Canadians from 1989 through to 1993 - and there's another tick up in 1994 - who are agreeing with the statement that anyone can get AIDS. It is everybody's issue. It is not something that only affects people who have chosen a certain lifestyle. It is everybody in this country concerned about this issue.
Another way of looking at it is whether it is a mainstream or marginal issue. Percentages say that these are extremely serious problems. The term ``extremely serious'' is a proxy for the salience of an issue, such as national debt, government spending, unemployment, AIDS, taxes, GST, the economy. It isn't until you get down to about 45% that anything uneconomic even gets on this slide, and it's drugs; then comes juvenile delinquency. Debt, spending, unemployment and AIDS present extremely serious problems, according to a national attitude survey.
This is going back a little bit, but a sample of U.S. teens and young people were asked to tell what they thought media ought to be covering in the United States. They then compared it with what the media had been covering in the United States. They gave them a list of things.
It turns out that the major stories that ran that year in the United States, which is going back a couple of years, were nannygate, Bosnia, Somalia, the plight of the homeless, the federal deficit. The very top issue that U.S. teens and youth think ought to be covered by the media and the thing that they want information about is AIDS and AIDS research. The reason is that it is a mainstream issue for them, because it's a public health concern for them. It's a public health concern for anybody who's sexually active in North America.
If you ask Canadian youth what they would do if they had a hundred dollars, what they would donate it to, the first grouping is domestic violence; that is to say, organizations or community groups that are involved in trying to curb domestic violence. The second is AIDS. Then come environment, arts, culture, and animal rights, but the numbers get very small all the way down to a political party, interestingly enough.
Back in 1994 we went out to Simon Fraser University and UBC, and we asked in focus groups a number of students a number of questions. We were out to get a reading on four things. The first thing we wanted was their understanding of what the important issues are in Canada today; the second is we wanted them to tell us what their expectations of companies in Canada are today; the third was to get a specific probe on their attitudes about HIV/AIDS. The final thing we wanted to know in all of this, after establishing a framework of thinking about these issues, was where Molson should be and what Molson's role is?
The issues of importance in 1994, according to these young people, in order, are obviously jobs. They're students. They're concerned about whether they're going to find jobs as they graduate from SFU or UBC. This was number one on most of the students minds, if not all. The second was AIDS, and then came the environment, deficit, crime, and immigration.
When we were in the field, national unity was an issue. I'm not sure it would crop up in UBC and SFU today as much as it did then. I don't know.
The main thing is the top three: jobs, AIDS, environment; environment, AIDS, jobs; jobs, environment, AIDS. These are high-issue salients among young people.
If you ask them what corporations ought to be giving to, their agenda was: AIDS, education, and the environment. There was no question in their minds.
If you ask them what role Molson should play in all this - since they all know Molson sells beer, they sponsor the Molson Indy in Vancouver, hockey, rock and roll - the first thing they said was that there's a role for Molson, and why wouldn't there be? They had trouble understanding what we were getting at, in terms of the question. We almost had to say that some people don't think a beer company ought to be doing this, and that in fact some people don't think large corporations ought to be involved in this issue at all. They wondered why not. They had a lot trouble trying to get their heads around just what it was we were trying to get at. They just saw it as something that was important to them as consumers and wondered why we wouldn't be involved in it. So much for the homophobic argument.
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About six years ago, Molson was asked by some people who were sponsoring an event in Toronto if we could provide the beer for the closing night party. This was a party to celebrate the very first Dancers for Life. It was the cast party, so it was Karen Cain and Rex Harrington, the National Ballet, Danny Grossman, ballet, jazz, all these people coming to one stage in Toronto to raise money for AIDS.
I'd like to tell you that six years ago we sat down and we were brilliant. We were strategic, figured it all out, and we started down this path knowing that we could bring ourselves to a point where we could help raise money for AIDS education, research, and care, and get us closer to our consumers. That's not the way it happened.
We answered the phone, and that is how we got involved in the AIDS issue. We took a meeting with some people whom we knew from other lives, we sat down with them, and they told us about Dancers for Life, which I had never heard of. It was the second year in existence; it's now in year seven or eight. They asked if we would help provide the beer for the party.
We said to tell us more, as maybe there were other ways we could help. It started a kind of informal partnership with the voluntary sector, with community groups in Toronto specifically, because that's where Molson's head office is now. That's where the meeting took place. It started out of Toronto.
It gradually spread, both through the AIDS and community organizations, through the arts and entertainment community, and to a certain extent, as you'll see, the sporting community. It also spread through Molson's offices because more and more people in the movement in the community organizations and grassroots groups heard about Molson and heard that our door was open to this issue and that we were available, not only for money, but to give our hours and our time. The word spread and we got requests for more projects and more events.
This is a kind of a menu of the things that we've been doing, a bunch of events right throughout the past seven years across the country. What I've done is I've got just two or three little case studies to show you of the level and degree of Molson involvement in some of these events to help raise awareness and to help raise money for community organizations.
The first one I want to talk to you about is Casey House, a hospice in Toronto. One day June Callwood, who knew someone who knew someone who worked with us at Molson, called up and said she really wanted to take us on a tour of Casey House. She said she understood we were involved in Dancers for Life and said she wanted to talk to us about the other things we were doing.
When people ask us sometimes how we got involved in the AIDS issue, the shortest answer sometimes is just to ask whether they have ever met June Callwood. This is a very difficult person to say no to. She said she really believed in what we were doing down here and thought Molson could help and would really like it if we came.
Three of us went on a tour of Casey House. We saw a little miracle. It's something that until you've gone through Casey House or an AIDS hospice, you really will not believe it. There's a list as long as your arm to volunteer for Casey House. With some of those things, from a corporate point of view, we were saying that there is something very special going on here.
The first thing we did with Casey House is we sponsored the Leontyne Price fund-raising concert at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto. It helped raise about $30,000 or $40,000. The other sponsors involved were Shoppers Drug Mart, Hotel Intercontinental, and Novopharm. We're not the only corporation involved in this issue and we don't come to you with that kind of pretension. There are other companies helping in this issue. I want to make that very clear.
In terms of Laughing Matters, this is the equivalent of Dancers for Life. It's for comedy, where some of the best comedians in that year get together on one stage and they raise money for HIV/AIDS in Toronto. That's a fund-raising event.
At Casey House, though, they wanted people to know who they were. They wanted people in the broad public to understand who they were, what they were about, and what they did. We said we would help them with their marketing and their public relations. We formed an ad hoc committee on marketing for Casey House and we produced a radio commercial that ran in Toronto about five years ago. This is the commercial. I'm just going to give us every chance to hear this because it's not very big.
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[Audio presentation]
Mr. Fremes: That was the very first radio commercial awareness generator we did at Molson. There was no Molson identification at all on it. That will start to change as we go through this.
The second case study is Dancers for Life. We started out sponsoring the cast party and we grew it. We involved our customers. We produced a tent card - tent card is beer talk for just what you see up there; you've seen lots of them - which says:
- In support of Dancers for Life, Molson Breweries will donate a portion of its sales from Molson
Canadian, [etc.], between January 15 and February 15, 1992 to the AIDS Committee of
Toronto. Please join us in the fight against AIDS.
The next year we produced this. This was the program ad and it was also supported by transit shelter advertising. There's an example of tying it into the customer in Toronto by serving Molson brands and helping to raise money with a donation of sales going to AIDS education, research and care.
This was last year's Dancers for Life ballet publicity shot, the transit shelter campaign in Toronto. It sells out every year in Toronto. You can't get a ticket unless you start ordering very early in the game. There's a full year's program with the T-shirt, the program, the transit shelter campaign and the ad on the program.
I want to take you very quickly through three radio commercials that will give you an equivalent idea of what we were doing in other media. The first one is Timothy Findley. In the second two the creative team, which is the same team that works on the Molson ``Take care, don't drink and drive'' program, was asked to try to put some more emotion into this. The first one is Timothy Findley's public service announcement and the next two show a little bit more Molson identification as well as some emotion, and, we hope, some impact.
[Audio presentation]
Mr. Fremes: Then we have last year's.
[Audio presentation]
.1605
Mr. Fremes: The last one was Molly Johnson's voice. The first was Timothy Findley's, who we all know is a great Canadian writer. The middle one used professional talents in Toronto who had worked on projects and who we asked to donate their time and service. Dancers for Life is the signature case-study of our involvement in this issue and with community organizations and is something that we are obviously very proud of as a company.
And there's more. The walks across this country take place in October. They raise more money than all those other events put together. I believe the walk in Toronto alone raised about $1.1 million last year, whereas Dancers for Life nets about $100,000 to $125,000.
The walks in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax, Calgary and Montreal have been sponsored by Molson over the past two to three years. It's a way in which we can both work with community organizations and involve our employees, which is something we have to currently emphasize when we're talking to corporations. As corporations face fewer and fewer resources to do more and more things, similar to governments in a way, they have to find a way to motivate employees. Involving them in an issue or a cause that makes them feel good about working for a company is a very good way to contribute to morale.
The walk in Toronto and Montreal with Molson involvement is shown in an example of the transit shelter. What I'd like to do is play a tape of how the walk is covered. If you're thinking about how a business audience might react to this tape, they're looking at how this is playing. Maybe they didn't watch television that day - you can never assume they did - so you want to show a corporation how the media covered the event you're asking them to get involved with. So we show them this clip, which is a tape of highlights of the media coverage of last year's walk.
[Video presentation]
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Mr. Fremes: It just gives people who you can assume have never seen an event covered on television an overview of how it played across the country.
The last example is the Kumbaya Festival. This is Molly Johnson's - a blues and jazz singer in Toronto - almost single-handed attempt with MCA and Molson and other corporate sponsors to involve the music community in Canada to raise money. What she does is she gets the best Canadian artists that she can find to come for nothing - almost unheard of - down to Ontario Place and play a whole day on the Monday of the Labour Day weekend. They play along with the union and everybody else donating their time and their services, and she raises about $200,000, which is donated to other community organizations across the country.
There's a tape that just shows you how we can position Molson in it as well as how it works on national television. Again, bear with us. This is five hours of television edited down to a minute and a half.
The key thing to keep in mind, I think, is that if you're presenting to a business audience, which this is designed for, they want to see how their company might look. So they're looking for how Molson looked. We showed them how Molson looked, so there's a little more Molson in five hours than you'd ordinarily see.
[Video Presentation]
Mr. Fremes: Again, talking to corporate people, you say the toughest lesson in marketing is that sometimes less is more. That's five hours of television that says we're bringing this to you commercial free and we're Molson Canadian. There's a mention of Molson as we present the cheque and a mention of Molson at the end of the five hours, thanking people and saying goodbye. Those were the three Molson mentions in five hours of live television.
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Yet when we did our audience recall and our post-testing, the Molson involvement in that event scored very highly, even though we had only the three mentions over the five hours. We were out there by ourselves and it was so intrusive in marketing terms that it sort of sticks out in people's minds.
You don't always have to have three thirty-second commercials every fifteen minutes in order to make your point.
We have some other examples and then we're going to summarize and allow some time for questions. You've been very patient, and I thank you.
Red Hot Nights started in the United States. In the Canadian version, the Canadian Stage Company approached us a couple of years ago and said they were doing a number of things and they wanted to be involved in this issue. They said you people are corporate marketers and involved in the issue; we'd like to raise money and do for theatre what Dancers For Life has done for dance. They asked us to form a partnership, use our marketing skills, and raise awareness. We sponsored three or four performances of Red Hot Nights by the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto.
This shows the merchandise program that we sponsored with the Eight Ball with the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research, CANFAR.
Finally, people in the public sector as well as the private sector like to know what the results were. What did all this do?
This is sort of a very quick and dirty list of some of the achievements. There has now been over $4.5 million raised. That is not from Molson alone, but from events Molson has been involved with. Those are not Molson donations. Those are efforts from other groups, community organizations, and people in dance, theatre, entertainment, and rock and roll. They have helped Molson and others raise this money.
Something that's very difficult to quantify, but which business - and I think government as well - is starting to understand is the whole notion of partnerships and relationships. When you develop them and strengthen them, you are a better company or a better institution for it. We have ended up with some very significant and strong relationships as a result of our involvement in this issue. We have partnerships with not only AIDS community organizations, but with other companies who are getting behind it as well.
We know from our own research that it has made a contribution to Molson's corporate image. Molson's image is actually pretty high and this has made a contribution to it. People like the fact that we're doing this. As you saw in the research, consumers see it as being perfectly consistent with who we are and what we're about.
Finally, and difficult to quantify, although we have some employee attitude research and some qualitative work as well, is that being involved in the AIDS walks and offering employees an opportunity to make a contribution to their community can contribute to pride and to morale. As we said earlier, in a time of shrinking resources, those are two not insignificant contributions or results.
That's it for the formal part of the presentation. I really do want to thank you. You've been very patient, and I hope we have time for some questions. Thank you.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Fremes. It was quite interesting, and indeed quite refreshing. It's very different from what was said by the other witnesses who testified before the various subcommittees.
I am very happy to see the kind of approach that Molson took in that regard. It's a very human social approach. You've shown leadership with this video, compared to the other large Canadian corporations, which may sometimes have some trouble integrating. They understand the integration issue, especially with a marketing image. I thank you very much and I wish to congratulate you once again.
We'll have all the time you'll need, because you are our only witness this afternoon. We are quite pleased about that. Mr. Ménard will start the question period.
Mr. Ménard (Hochelaga - Maisonneuve): First, I must tell you that I'm the member of Parliament for Hochelaga - Maisonneuve, a riding in the east end of Montreal. Your Quebec headquarters is not very far from where I live. I've had several times the pleasure of being invited by your Quebec public relations spokesman, Mr. Houle.
Mr. Fremes: The old number 15 with the Montreal Canadians.
Mr. Ménard: What was his hockey nickname?
Mr. Fremes: Réjean Pinotte.
Mr. Ménard: Yes, that's it. Our committee should thank you, because your project is really a model that should be exported. One cannot imagine to what degree a corporate citizen such as you must be involved.
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I have three questions to ask you. I see that you realized that this issue really concerned Canadians, but, in fact, it's a new way to get involved with the community. During my last year in university, I was studying management. Even if we're aware of how optimistic you are about the future, Mr. Chairman, the fact is that I was studying management, and they were starting to teach us some principles such as the concept that being a manager was more than being just an accountant, but that a manager also had to have a relationship with the community. Our teachers didn't really have an example of a very involved corporate citizen to give us. Unless I'm delving into Molson's strategic planning, I would like to know how this idea was born, because you can make a very positive evaluation of it. That's my first question.
Second, could a government such as the Canadian Government and this Committee reviewing the Canadian Strategy on AIDS do anything more to help you and to ensure that you could contribute even more easily to these fund-raising activities?
Third, you mentioned that you showed this video to other corporate citizens. Was your involvement ``infectious'', and forgive me the bad pun, for some other private sector partners?
[English]
Mr. Fremes: Thank you very much for the introduction and the compliments. I'll pass those on to Réjean Houle for sure.
I would say the idea of our involvement with the AIDS issue - how was it born, where did it come from - is a natural extension of other things Molson has been involved in, and I'll tell you what I mean by that.
I think you may know this already, but the Molson family were the people who started the very first hospital in Montreal. Molson has been donating to health and community projects and social services projects in this country, wherever it's had operations, for over 250 years. So when people ask us, ``Why AIDS?'', the real short answer is ``Why not? Why wouldn't we?'' It's consistent with what we have been doing in the past. The specific example that I've told you about, how we actually got involved in the HIV/AIDS issue with one community organization asking us for help, is correct but it's built on a past, on a tradition that goes way back to Molson.
What can government do? The short answer is that as I talk to corporations - usually at the request of community organizations, but sometimes at the request of the corporations - there are two or three needs out there. I think the first thing government can do is to understand those needs. I must tell you that we work very closely with the Health Canada people and it's my view that they do understand these needs. I don't think anything I've said today would be new to them. They get this and they know what needs to be done and they're working on it.
People might argue that we need to accelerate it. People might argue that there's a risk within some governments that this issue is falling off the agenda, that this issue is getting fewer and fewer resources devoted to it, but I don't think there are any questions among the politicians and the bureaucrats of the need for a commitment behind this issue.
The key theme is a partnership. It's business, government and community and health care professionals working together on something and developing a national consensus on something. The ``something'' on which they have to develop a national consensus is, I believe, that this is everybody's problem, everybody's challenge.
I think Molson can make a contribution with it's understanding of the consumer and market research. We can show them that it's on everybody's agenda. You don't get that kind of public opinion research out of Goldfarb, or anybody else, unless it is high up there with jobs, the deficit, taxes - the things that we know are on the economic screen of Canadians.
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That being said, there isn't enough of it out there. Corporations need to see more proof; they need to see more evidence. Molson has seen enough and we've done our own homework on it, which I think you can tell. But other corporations out there remain to be convinced. They won't come to the aid of the party without more research.
In concrete terms what can be done? I think the government and some interested people in the private sector - and by government I don't just mean Health Canada, I mean the federal government and the provincial governments - ought to put together the definitive consumer public opinion research database on AIDS. It would show corporations particularly and politicians secondarily that Canadians care about this issue, that it's high on their agenda and their consumers and employees care about it too.
Ms Bridgman (Surrey North): Thank you very much for your presentation. I am a Reform MP from Surrey in British Columbia. I have similar questions to what have been asked. I think the committee has come to one conclusion that there is a lack of participation by businesses and it is asking what is holding up participation. You've certainly addressed some of today's issues.
I commend Molson for jumping in and leading the way there, but I don't know about a study as opposed to an education program for businesses and that kind of thing. We already have things like the National Strategy on AIDS program and numerous other things. Another message coming out is that coordination of these things needs to be improved.
First of all, does a product make the difference in companies getting involved? Second, AIDS involves a young target group of people, up to about age 45 or so. Why not cancer, hepatitis B, or breast cancer, to get specific as areas where companies can get involved? Cancer is a big issue, heart disease is a big issue, but why AIDS? Does a product make a difference in companies becoming involved?
Mr. Fremes: Let me go back through those. In terms of why not cancer or heart disease, one of the things we found in our involvement with this whole area of HIV/AIDS is because of the way the disease came about in Canada - in fact came about in the world - and because of the people who were affected by it, a reality set in in the 1980s. The reality was that an epidemic is upon us. it's killing a lot of us. There is no cure. There are shrinking government and private-sector resources to throw at it, so the community and volunteer response I talked about got thrown behind the issue. A lot of people who cared about the issue and cared about people who had been afflicted by it came forward and volunteered their time and effort.
What these people had at the time was a great deal of enthusiasm, and I've said that to these people and I'd say it if they were sitting here. What they didn't have was anywhere near the marketing and fund-raising skills of the people involved in the more established traditional diseases or health charities. They didn't have the keys to the doors that opened the corporate board rooms. They weren't friends with the chairman or the CEO. They didn't play golf in the same clubs. They didn't go to the same restaurants. They weren't in the same world as these people and they had a competitive disadvantage in marketing terms ``writ large'' to close.
As a company you look at what needs to be done and what could be done. We only have a few dollars. I'm not here to tell you that Molson's is in the business of solving the AIDS issue because that's not our business at all. Our business is making beer and making money by making beer. We are trying to put something back into the country, and hopefully we're perceived as being a good corporate citizen. But our mission statement isn't to find the cure for HIV/AIDS. I'm being glib, but I'm sure you understand.
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So in terms of cancer and heart disease, we do give to those health charities as well, but we felt there was a crying need to make up some of the gap.
One of the things we've been doing is trying to help the community organizations with their marketing and fund-raising, because there's a way to talk to businesses in their language. When a lot of these people from community organizations see this presentation on how we talk to business, they come away with a better understanding of how they can present their case for the AIDS committee of Sault Ste. Marie, or whatever they represent.
Ms Bridgman: I think I'm hearing that when you're looking at businesses becoming involved there are two things you would pull out. One would be the condition that it have a fairly high profile with a certain age group, like AIDS and youth and that kind of thing. The other would be education within the business community for marketing skills to promote this kind of thing. It's something they haven't done before, so there's a lack of knowledge in how to go about that.
Mr. Fremes: I would say yes, with a bit of a qualifier. The second point needs to be qualified because it doesn't pertain only to the AIDS issue. Our research shows that if you want to be involved in what's now understood to be cause-related marketing; if you're a company and you want people to buy your product because you're involved with an issue, area or cause that's close to them as consumers, and say during the month of June, x% of Molson sales will go to an environmental organization because you know people think the environment is important, there is a way to go about doing that. Marketing people and corporate people generally are learning more and more about that by the day. Canadian companies are going down that path more and more. The AIDS issue is no different from any other issue when they are raising money for a health charity.
Ms Bridgman: If you were going to target a company to support an issue, you would probably pick an issue that targets that. Beer, for example, is associated with better sales in youth than in elderly people -
Mr. Fremes: Sorry to interrupt. I know where you're going, but the fact is the data doesn't just say young people care about the issue. You care about it because you have a 20-year-old daughter or a 17-year-old grandson. It doesn't matter because it's a public health issue that's up there with the economy. I would just remind you that cancer and heart disease aren't on that list.
I would say you don't have to have a consumer niche or a consumer target group that is by definition youth-oriented, like Levi's jeans or Coca-Cola or whatever. It doesn't only have to be those people. You can look at being involved and getting closer to people who sell RRSPs because they are parents of kids who could be affected by this thing.
Ms Bridgman: But you'd probably get those who sell RRSPs to support cancer easier because that's the group -
Mr. Fremes: Today you could because they don't know about this, but with the education we were talking about earlier you could probably move them.
Ms Augustine (Etobicoke - Lakeshore): I too want to commend Molson for being a good corporate citizen. The notion of partnership is so very important where business and government work together.
I'd like to ask whether the research was done before you committed to the program or after you were committed to participate. It seems to me, from some of my own experiences, that it took companies many years before they would allow - let's take the car industry, for example - a black man to stand beside a car to sell the car, simply because there was the whole issue of image. There was a sense that the image of all the negative stereotypical things that were addressed to black people would somehow be associated with the car. So this is the question I have about the research. Did it come before or after?
I'll ask my other question so that you can answer in one fell swoop.
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Has Molson gone beyond PR and promotion and fund-raising with the beautiful people to addressing the hiring practices within Molson so that people with AIDS can...? What are your workplace practices, and what is your commitment to fund-raising and education? How do you in some practical way exhibit this in the workplace?
I know the situation of Casey House. I come from Toronto and I also come from Metro Toronto Housing as chair of its board. My experience there was that people with AIDS, not those at the point where they need Casey House but those in the early stages, had a lot of difficulty finding housing.
So there are some real important questions apart from promotion and giving a few dollars. Apart from what is being done on education and new discoveries and research, etc., there is also the other side, the practical day-to-day needs of people with AIDS. How can companies get involved in that?
Mr. Fremes: The research came after our initial involvement. One of the things about getting involved in this area almost by accident, or, as I said, by answering the phone and having a meeting with this organization, was that we couldn't possibly be accused of sitting down and developing some sort of Machiavellian plan because we stumbled into this, and we admit it freely. Once we started down a path and started to get more and more requests, however, and our commitment grew, we owed it to ourselves and to our shareholders and to our employees to understand the issue better and to understand the nature of the involvement. So that's when we started to do more research.
I would just remind you that a lot of the research that we quoted from here is what we would call desk research. It's not Molson research. It's available to people who go to libraries and dig it out. I think what we were talking about earlier was how we can get that to the attention of some corporations because they're not in the business of going into libraries and digging out research. They are in the business of perhaps taking a presentation or going to a conference and having something sponsored where they could be moved along.
In terms of the workplace, we, as a member of the Brewers' Association of Canada, along with all brewers in Canada, endorsed the federal government's call for an AIDS in the workplace strategy and policy. We have in place programs to make that go that are akin and related to our employment equity programs.
Mr. Culbert (Carleton - Charlotte): Mr. Fremes, first of all, like others, I certainly want to congratulate you and your company for the initiative that has been taken. I think you've impressed all of us on this subcommittee who have over the past several months searched our souls in many cases. The most important question is did you bring any samples with you today? No? Well, we'll just have to struggle along somehow then.
One of the important things that most of the various organizations that came before us indicated were the difficulties they were having in getting a concentrated fund-raising campaign together because of the stigma that HIV/AIDS connotated, correctly or incorrectly, due to their perception.
I suspect from your research that your marketing people or the key person within the Molson corporation who said ``Yes, we're going with this'' had something in the back of their mind. They saw the bigger picture, quite obviously, whereas a number of these groups and organizations have been unable to really achieve that and have had some difficulties.
My first question would be, do you have any advice? Secondly, and I think you touched on it in your statement, would you or someone from your corporation be prepared to work with representatives or a representative of these various organizations who are struggling in many communities in order to achieve similar things that Molson has done to sponsor events and so on? Would you act as a spearhead to them and sort of tell them how you were successful, and perhaps offer a little coaching?
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Mr. Fremes: I'll answer the second question first. Yes, we would be prepared to do that, and we have done that. The issue is, how much more can we do and how much time is available to do it? We have made this presentation, or a version of it, about 25 times in the past 12 to 13 months. There are various public relations conferences.
The other thing that should be said is that people who advise corporations about how they might improve their image, their share or their sales are frequently good resources for something like this as well. So we have targeted people who practise the disciplines of marketing, advertising and public relations, to sort of influence the influencers, if you see what I mean. That's been another route that we've taken.
So yes, we stand ready and we are available. We have Molson offices across the country and we have made this presentation in different communities of various sizes and we'll continue to do so.
What advice would we presume to offer? Only a repeat, I guess, of the answer to the very first question. The advice I would give is that if you're looking for a reason not to get involved in HIV/AIDS and you are either a government or a private company, there are lots of them. There are lots of ways you can sort of wiggle out of this and decide that this would not be in the interest of your company, your shareholders or your employees. There are tons of ways, real or imagined, to get off the hook, if you will. The real value, the real benefit and the real return on the investment is in making a commitment to something that makes people say ``this is a little different''.
When you take a lower case R risk, not a capital R risk, and do something that appears a little bit different from what you're normally perceived as doing, the return to you as a company or as any institution is considerably larger. That can be in terms of goodwill, of market share or volume, or it can be in terms of public opinion.
Our research is absolutely unequivocal on this. Canadians expect business and government and health care professional and community organizations to get on with the job. I think the order in which Canadians perceive and expect institutions to get involved is governments first. They aren't expecting General Motors to solve the HIV/AIDS issue. But they are expecting publicly subsidized health care facilities and research facilities and governments to help with education, prevention and care.
Mr. Culbert: Mr. Fremes, I guess the point is that there had to be someone in your corporation in whom the light switch came on and said ``We're going to be optimistic on this one; we're going to go with it''. I'm not going to cross-examine you to find out who that person was or how key it was in your corporation, but that would be the same, quite obviously, with any company. Somebody had to make that decision.
I guess from our perspective it's delightful to hear the positive news that you are bringing today in comparison with the more pessimistic news that many groups have brought forward and the difficulties they've had. I guess that's why I bring that out. If there's some way - and you touched on it yourself - through partnershipping that governments of all levels and the private sector can work together to accomplish what is our common goal, overcoming this dreaded disease, then I think we're championing everybody in this country.
I'm not suggesting that corporate Canada, whether it be Molson or any other major corporation, have all the responsibility. I'm not going to suggest that governments of one level or the other have all of the responsibility, but all of us collectively have some responsibility to optimistically challenge this difficult disease and help overcome it. If there is advice you can give us based on your successes, in which we can do that with corporate Canada through partnershipping of all levels and with all partners, I think we've stumbled onto something here.
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The Chairman: Before we go to a very quick second round with our members, I have two short questions for you, Mr. Fremes.
Has Molson Breweries encountered any negative consumer reaction for supporting the HIV/AIDS cause? Secondly, do you feel that because of images, stereotypes and prejudices, the companies to whom you present your marketing for AIDS are reluctant to be identified with a sexual orientation and that it may be the reason why they don't want to be identified or why they don't want to help the AIDS cause? Or do you feel that there is now an improvement with these companies?
Mr. Fremes: On the first question about whether or not we've encountered any negative consumer reaction, the answer is yes. But I have to put that into a bit of perspective for you.
We are a large marketer in this country and we don't do anything that doesn't encourage negative consumer reaction. There are people who don't think we should be sponsoring hockey. There are people who don't think we should be advertising on television and they write to us. There are people who don't think we should be sponsoring motor sports and they tell us about that. There are people who think our television advertising is too geared to young people and too youth-targeted and they write to tell us about that.
As large marketers and as a consumer-sensitive company, we are always on the alert for consumer opinion and we are always listening to consumers. I should tell you that we frequently make changes to what we do as a result of consumer feedback. We don't get it right 100% of the time. Otherwise, we'd just turn our phones off and not answer our mail.
On this issue, though, I have to tell you that you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of negative letters, telephone calls and responses we've had on this over the last seven years. It's been minuscule.
I'm not sure I could answer the second question because you're asking me to speak for corporate Canada and I don't know the answer. I think the Canadian Chamber of Commerce or the Business Council on National Issues, people who are more in the business of speaking for businesses nationally, could give you a sense of whether or not they think sexual orientation or attitudes about sexual orientation are being perceived as barriers to involvement in this or not, but I really can't say.
[Translation]
Mr. Ménard: I am going to ask you a rather self-centered and territorial question. In your involvement and redistribution policies, do you take into account some geographical considerations, like trying to be involved in each of the provinces, or do you prefer to have a community involvement? I saw in your promotion literature that you talked mainly about Montreal and Toronto. Are you rather aiming at cities where there is a bigger number of HIV positive people?
Secondly, you suggest in your results that your various activities - shows, marches, etc. - have produced, if I understood correctly, $4 million. Would it be indiscreet - and you can count on my absolute discretion as members of the committee know - to ask you how much that cost you in direct investments, as corporate citizen?
[English]
Mr. Fremes: On the first question, our involvement began in Toronto because that's where our siège social is. It's were we started because that's where people found us in the head office. It's where there's an awful lot of activity from AIDS organizations - Dancers for Life, Red Hot Nights and one of the most established and successful walks, Laughing Matters. A lot of the events that came to Molson for help with their marketing and their fund-raising were based in Toronto. There was, therefore, a kind of a correlation between where the activity was at the local level and where our head office was. That's why the partnership began there.
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The second part of the answer is that in terms of community relations activities, we tend to direct our efforts where we have Molson operations, where we have our breweries. We're in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Halifax. We're in places where we have sales offices or a presence, and that's where we direct our effort.
[Translation]
Mr. Ménard: I would like to ask a last short question which belongs to an issue I am most concerned with. I'm not sure you will have the answer. Does Molson, as corporate citizen, recognize in its relationships with its employees, in private insurance schemes or in any other way, same-sex spouses?
Mr. Fremes: Not yet.
Mr. Ménard: But it will be the case in the future?
Mr. Fremes: I don't know.
[English]
Mrs. Ur (Lambton - Middlesex): I thank you for your presentation. I don't want to sound like a money person here, but I do have a few questions. As for your corporation, are there any dollar figures for the percentage of donations given to - I realize you said $4 million - AIDS versus other charities to which Molson makes donations?
Secondly, you may or may not be aware that through budget cuts in government, sport allocations are on the decline or are being wiped out. With that in mind, another question I have is, will there be any direction for you to change your mode of contributions to sport versus health?
My last question hits the bottom line. You had stated that your involvement was certainly because of the interest of the company and shareholders. The question that statement triggers for me is, has the sale of your product increased since your involvement with the AIDS groups began?
Mr. Fremes: In terms of our contribution as a company to the ``AIDS issue versus other charities'' question, it's difficult to give you the complete answer because the Molson Companies, which is one of our three step-parents - we're owned by the Molson Companies, by the Foster's Brewing Group Ltd., of Australia, and by the Miller Brewing Co. Inc., of Milwaukee - manage the Molson donations fund, which is the charitable donations fund for all the companies, including Beaver, Diversey, Molson, etc. So the short answer on that question is, I don't know. I can find out and get back to you, though.
Mrs. Ur: I'd appreciate that.
Mr. Fremes: In terms of sport versus health, I think Molson's commitment on the HIV/AIDS issue is getting to be more and more understood by the AIDS organizations, certainly by governments, we hope, through forums like this, and by other corporations. I would not see us retreating or backing away from it as long as it remains a priority for our consumers and our employees. Regardless of whether sport gets more or less money from government, I think we're pretty well committed to this issue.
Have sales increased? It's very difficult to say whether sales have increased or stayed the same. When you're looking at an issue that's as controversial as HIV/AIDS, the one thing you look at first of all is that sales don't decrease. The first thing we did was measure our involvement versus awareness among different customers and different licensed premises around Toronto and then track sales.
Does the fact that we're involved with Dancers For Life and that this gets to be known in a certain community in part of Toronto, and that we're asking people to buy Molson brands to help contribute to it and raise money and so on, actually lead to people drinking less of our product? This was the first answer that we had to satisfy ourselves with. The first thing we saw was that the effort had very little effect on sales positively or negatively.
I think gradually, over time, if you get the recipe right you can get a little bit of consumer loyalty, not just on HIV/AIDS but on attaching yourself to an issue that is relevant and of interest to your consumer.
Mr. Jackson (Bruce - Grey): Mr. Fremes, welcome to the committee. It's certainly a pleasure to have you here.
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I am not going to grill you as to how you got into this work. I think it probably affects us all in many different ways. I told my colleagues that perhaps abstinence might help, but also there are people who go in for blood transfusions and people who go in for all kinds of reasons and get infected. So whenever there is a disease such as this, there has to be almost a war on the disease in order to try to wipe it out.
I have some questions of interest. I didn't get the gist of who you give the funds to. What kind of criteria do you have for giving the funds? Do you evaluate them, and how are some of these programs working? Are the programs actually giving people longer lives? Are they really helping, and in what way are they helping?
Mr. Fremes: Thank you very much for the comments. How we give out the money is actually also backed up by the research. The consumer, when you ask them if Molson should be involved with the AIDS issue, says quite legitimately that Molson ought to raise money or help somehow but what does Molson know about getting the money to the people who really need the help?
Consumers see us as quite rightly in the beer business. We're not a community organization or a public health authority. That is why in order for the marketing and the community relations program to be credible you've got to have a partnership with a local AIDS community organization. We have partnered with several of them: Casey House, CANFAR, AIDS Committee of Toronto, AIDS Committee of Vancouver, and Pacific AIDS Resource Centre - all across the country.
Many organizations are involved in this effort that we talked about earlier. Our door is open to all of them, because all of them are doing things but from different perspectives. Some are on the caregiving side of things, others are in the prevention education side of things, and still others are involved in trying to get business and government to move it up on their agenda - they are almost lobbyists and activists. All of them, we think, are making a contribution, and so our door is open to all of them.
The Chairman: We have a last question. Mrs. Bridgman, please.
Ms Bridgman: I have one quick question and it's probably a point of information, not having marketing skills.
When I was watching the Kumbaya presentation, there were three mentions of Molson and they were all fund-raising related, such as supporting the event and the mention of the cheque. I realize perception is very important, but the perception there is that it is a fund-raising thing. Do you think it's feasible to get more mentions of Molson but on an educational level, incorporating a statistic, breaking down a myth, or whatever? Why is it more fund-raising directed in relation to promotion? Could you slip in some education as well?
Mr. Fremes: There is a great deal of education that goes on in there. I said there was a two-minute clip of a five-hour television program. What I should do - I'd be happy to make this available to you - is get you a tape of all the public service announcements that ran during the five hours that were also part of the effort of the organizers.
They went to top-rate Canadian directors and producers and creative people and asked them, at their own cost, to produce public service announcements that would be directly aimed at education and prevention. There was one little one that showed up, the one about the World Health Organization, and every 18 seconds someone gets infected and there are 5,000 each day, but that was more of a statistic to get you engaged. There are others that are on the area of prevention and I can get those for you.
The Chairman: Merci beaucoup, Mr. Fremes. It was very interesting. I can see now why you are the senior vice-president, and probably you've been in the marketing business before. You really impressed us.
[Translation]
Thank you, once again. I wish you a safe trip back to Toronto.
Mr. Fremes: Thank you very much.
The Chairman: We'll take a two-minute break and we'll go on in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]