Dr. Trevor Hancock – Healthy people, healthy communities, a healthy planet

The issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance concerns are a factor in making investment decisions.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 March 2024

701 words

So far, in examining what the World Health Organization calls the commercial determinants of health, I have been looking at private sector firms that produce products that harm health, such as tobacco, fossil fuels or unhealthy foods. But the private sector does not just produce goods, it also provides financial services – such as banking and pensions – that support various industries by investing in them or providing loans.

Where these services are provided to companies that are producing products that are good for our health, such as healthy food or healthy housing, they contribute to health. But when they provide financial support to industries that produce harmful products they are harming health.

This issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns are a factor in making investment decisions. Ethical investors, for example, may choose not to invest in tobacco, fossil fuels or armaments for moral reasons.

In a recent article in Forbes Advisor, finance advisor Kat Tretina comments: “Investing solely to benefit from the highest possible returns is becoming somewhat passé.” She cites a 2022 Stanford University report that found “Older investors are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of forfeiting investment return to advance ESG objectives.”

On the other hand, the study found “most young investors claim to be willing to give up moderate (between 5 and 15 percent) or large amounts (over 15 percent) to bring about environmental, social, and governance changes.”

But while ethical investment can be a personal decision about where to invest, most of us have large parts of our investments through our pensions (the CPP and various other pension funds) over which we have little or no direct control. So it is important that banks and pension funds invest ethically on our behalf, and that we urge them to do so.

In the case of tobacco, as a result of persistent advocacy by anti-smoking groups around the world, a number of major pension funds have divested from tobacco. A 2020 report from Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada noted several public pension funds have divested from tobacco, including California in 2000, Aotearoa New Zealand (2007) and Norway (2010).

But the report also notes: “Within Canada, with the notable exception of Alberta, governments have not consistently accepted responsibility for ensuring that the money under their stewardship is not invested in tobacco.” Indeed, in responding to one of my columns, Pender Island resident Paul Hutcheson noted in a January 22^nd comment in this newspaper that the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), which is an arm of the BC government, “has $124.25 million invested in the tobacco industry.”

When it comes to fossil fuels, the Canadian banking and pension sectors have been the focus of recent critical reports. A March 24 report from FinanceMap, part of a global non-profit think tank called Influence Map, found that the ‘Big Five’ Canadian banks (Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Scotiabank, Bank of Montreal, and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) “are undermining their own net zero commitments through their financing activities, lack of robust sector financing policies, and inconsistent policy engagement.”

Specifically, the report found, “the Big Five steadily increased their fossil fuel financing exposure from an average of 15.5 percent in 2020 to 18.4 percent in 2022” compared to “6.1 percent for leading US banks and 8.7 percent for European banks.”

Moreover, none “have committed to a phase-out of financing thermal coal” or “publicly advocated for ambitious climate-related policy in Canada.” This in spite of the fact that they are all signatories to the Net Zero Banking Alliance.

The pension funds don’t fare any better. The 2023 Canadian Pension Climate Report Card from Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health noted that not a single pension fund had acknowledged “the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels”. Indeed, “Canada’s largest pension funds continue to invest their own members’ retirement savings in companies that are accelerating the climate crisis, while delaying efforts to confront this unprecedented threat.”

Isn’t it time the financial sector stopped investing in products that harm our health – and remember, there are many other industries out there that harm our health – and instead invested in our health and wellbeing?

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

The shift towards a healthy food system: Too little, too late

·      Published as “Voluntary agreements with food industry not good enough”

The challenges we face are now so massive and occurring so rapidly that such leisurely approaches will be too little, too late

Dr. Trevor Hancock

12 March 2024

700 words

My recent columns have looked at the many ways in which our food system harms both our health and the health of the planet. So worrying is the extent of that harm that in September 2021 the UN held a Food Systems Summit to discuss the transformations in food systems that are needed.

At the Summit, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the focus had to be on “feeding growing populations in ways that contribute to people’s nutrition, health and well-being, restore and protect nature, are climate neutral, adapted to local circumstances, and provide decent jobs and inclusive economies.” The Summit called for every country to appoint a national food systems convenor to establish a pathway to a transformed food system.

Then in 2023 the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting to discuss food systems for people’s nutrition and health. The resulting dialogue “emphasized the importance of aligning food systems with nutrition and health goals” and using a systems approach to “integrate nutritious food systems actions throughout government policies while protecting the environment.”

Here in Canada, the federal government launched its Food Policy for Canada in 2019, with the goal of creating a healthier and more sustainable food system in which “all people in Canada are able to access a sufficient amount of safe, nutritious, and culturally diverse food.”

Canada also created the position of a national food systems convenor, who is a senior official in Agriculture and Agri-food Canada. Then in 2021 ‘Canada’s National Pathways’ report was published. The report looked at how to get to a healthier and more sustainable food system in the context of evidence that “one in 10 Canadian households experience moderate or severe food insecurity due to economic constraints; almost two in three Canadian adults are overweight or obese; and, over a third of Canada’s food supply is never eaten.”

Seven priority areas were identified in the document: Eliminating hunger and reducing food insecurity; reducing food loss and waste; strengthening Indigenous food systems; advancing environmentally sustainable production; supporting local food economies and a strong workforce; improving human and animal health, and working towards a National School Food Policy and Nutritious Meal Program.

But the Pathways report is quite weak on the health side. Glaringly, there is no reference anywhere to diet-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer. The section on human and animal health focuses first on animal health, and the part on human health refers only to reducing sodium, fat and sugar through Canada’s 2016 ‘Healthy Eating Strategy’ and the Canada Food Guide, both of which are voluntary and intended “to make it easier for Canadians to make the healthier choice.”

But what is missing, it seems to me, is a sense of urgency. Governments and industry are still employing 20^th century approaches – risk management, tweaks here and there, voluntary agreements with the food industry – to 21^st century problems. Voluntary agreements to reduce sodium, for example, have clearly failed, while commitments to merely “monitor the extent and nature of advertising to children”, for example, are grossly inadequate. The government’s failure to pass legislation to control this illustrates both the government’s pusillanimity and the industry’s power, as well as its disregard for the wellbeing of children.

But the challenges we face are now so massive and occurring so rapidly that such leisurely approaches will be too little, too late. Nowhere in the Pathways report, for example, is there any suggestion of the need to move to a low-meat diet, other than a passing reference to “changes in consumer demand”. But a shift to a low-meat diet needs to be a central component of Canada’s  health food and healthy eating strategies if we are to get the very large health and environmental benfits of such a shift.

Admittedly, that shift is embedded in the new Canada Food Guide, but that is just a guide. Why not make it an urgent government priority to shift Canada’s agri-food industry towards producing a diet that is consistent with Canada food guide, and to make the unhealthy choice the difficult choice by, for example, banning or restricting advertising of unhealthy foods, raising taxes on such foods, and/or reducing taxes on health foods?

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “Corporate lobbying needs to be kept out of the food system”)

The process of revising the Canada Food Guide shows that prohibiting or severely restricting private-sector lobbying has benefits for the health of people and the planet

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 March 2024

700 words

In my last three columns I looked at the health and economic burden of unhealthy diets, the role of large parts of the food industry in producing and marketing an unhealthy diet, and the ways in which our current food system harms the planet. Clearly this has to stop, and you would think that governments would take a much stronger line than they do in requiring the food industry to put people and planet first.

However, governments seem reluctant to act. In part that is because the food industry is at best a challenging ‘partner’, often actively opposed to changes that would make our food system healthier for people and the planet. Moreover, the industry spends a lot of money lobbying governments to protect itself and promote its own interests.

Indeed, a study by researchers at the Université de Montréal and published in December 2023 in the Public Health Agency of Canada’s own journal noted extensive evidence that “the bio-food industry interferes with the development of public food policies worldwide through corporate political activity.”  Such activity “is defined as the attempts by corporate actors to shape public policy in ways that would protect or expand their markets or favour their industry’s interests.”

Note that this is the industry’s interests, which should not be confused with the public interest. Indeed, they add, the World Health Organization has expressed concern that such activity “may limit governments’ abilities to develop and maintain effective public health policies.”

For example, a 2022 article in the journal Globalization and Health looked at lobbying in relation to Health Canada’s Healthy Eating Strategy, from September 2016 to January 2021. At the time, Health Canada was proposing “revisions to Canada’s Food Guide, changes to the nutritional quality of the food supply, front-of-pack nutrition labelling and restrictions on food marketing to children.”

Using data from Canada’s Registry of Lobbyists, the researchers found the vast majority – around 90 percent – of registered lobbyyists and the corporations and organizations they represented had ties to industry, meaning the public interest barely got a word in edgeways, suggesting “a strategic advantage of industry stakeholders in influencing Canadian policymakers.”

The good news is that, just for once, and unusually, the Minister put in place restrictions on lobbying “during the revision of the Food Guide to minimize potential conflict of interest.” As a result,  staff at the Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion “did not interact with stakeholders from the food and beverage industry during the development process.” So effective was this, in fact, that the Globe and Mail reported in 2017 that the industry tried an end run by asking Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to lobby Health Canada for them.

Indeed, the Université de Montréal study noted, the Dairy Farmers of Canada even went so far as to ask the Prime Minister to “direct the Minister of Health to do her homework” when their industry-funded research findings were contradicted by independent research, while the Turkey Farmers of Canada wanted environmental impacts of food removed from consideration.  

The good news is that in the case of the revisions to Canada’s Food Guide, which was “the only initiative with extensive safeguards during the policy development process”, there were “significant changes and successful implementation.” The bad news is that “the policy which received the greatest amount of attention from industry (i.e., marketing to children) resulted in failed policy implementation”; it died in the Senate in 2019.

The lesson we should learn: Prohibit or severely restrict private sector lobbying – which, let’s face it, is just a form of buying influence. Doubtless we will heal squeals from the corporate world that their rights are being infringed, and they will invoke the wholly ridiculous notion – although apparently embedded in Canadian law, according to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada – that the corporation “has the same rights and obligations as a natural person under Canadian law.”

But what these and other studies make clear is that it is the rights of Canadians to health and a healthy environment that are being trampled upon by many parts of the corporate and commercial world. It is way past time government stopped protecting corporations and stood up for the health of people and the planet.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• (Published as  “When it comes to food, what’s good for us is also good for the planet”)

A healthy diet can massively reduce our environmental impact — agriculture is responsible for 80 per cent of global deforestation and 70 per cent of freshwater use

Dr. Trevor Hancock

27 February 2024

699 words

What some call the agri-food sector – primary agriculture, food and beverage processors, food retailers and wholesalers, and foodservice providers – has a problem. We need to feed 8 billion people. But if the whole world ate the way we do, not only would their health be harmed and the toll of 11 million premature deaths would grow enormously, but the damage to the Earth’s natural systems would also grow enormously.

A 2022 UN report on global land use noted: “Modern agriculture has altered the face of the planet more than any other human activity”. The report found that “agriculture now occupies approximately 40 percent of the global land area”, and that 52 percent of that land is degraded. Moreover, agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of global deforestation and 70 percent of freshwater use, while drivers linked to food production cause 70 percent of land-based biodiversity loss and 50 percent of freshwater biodiversity loss.

Food production also accounts for about one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, much of it methane from cows and other ruminant livestock and nitrous oxides from fertilizer use, the report notes. In addition, “deforestation and the draining and burning of peatlands for food and commodity production generate the bulk of carbon emissions”, while  centuries of ploughing and soil erosion have added large quantities of CO₂ to the atmosphere.

On top of that should be added the impact of food fisheries on the oceans and marine biodiversity. The World Wildlife Fund, citing the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, notes “the number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century and today fully one-third of the world’s assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits.” In addition, there is substantial harm done to unwanted species – known as bycatch – as well as turtles, dolphins  and whales.

And added to all that is the pollution arising from the use of pesticides and fertilizers, animal manure and other causes, which result both in toxic impacts on humans and wildlife (pesticides cause harm to to the nervous sytem and reproduction in many species), while runoff “degrades water and soil quality, and causes eutrophication” – ‘dead zones’ in the oceans and algal blooms in lakes.

Clearly this state of affairs is unsustainable, especially when we consider that “nearly 80% of total agricultural land is dedicated to feed and livestock production while providing less than 20% of the world’s food calories”, according to the 2022 UN report. But meat consumption has been trending upwards, globally, for decades, suggesting that even more land will be needed, and it will need to be farmed more intensively.

The good news is that, as is usually the case, what is good for the planet is also good for us. It turns out that a more healthy diet is a more sustainable diet, as was described in a 2019 report from a Commission established by The Lancet – one of the world’s leading medical journals – and EAT – a global, non-profit foundation established to catalyze
a food system transformation.

The report – “Our Food in the Anthropocene” – explored how we would get healthy diets from sustainable food systems, noting that “without action . . . today’s children will inherit a planet that has been severely degraded and where much of the population will increasingly suffer from malnutrition and preventable disease.”

They called for “a radical transformation of the global food system”, proposing “a more than doubling in the consumption of healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and nuts, and a greater than 50% reduction in global consumption of less healthy foods such as added sugars and red meat”, much like the new Canada Food Guide.

The report’s authors lay out a plan for such a transformation, adding: “Food is the single strongest lever
to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth.” So a healthy diet can massively reduce our environmental impact. We urgently need the agri-food industry to be 100 percent behind this shift, for the sake of people and the planet. But their track record is not good and clearly the industry cannot be trusted to change quickly enough on its own, so this will require government action, as I discuss next week.

 © Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Dr. Trevor Hancock

20 February 2024

700 words

Last week I noted the private sector is the key player in the provision of a healthy diet. But the food industry also makes a great deal of money from the production and marketing of unhealthy food. It is estimated that globally, unhealthy diets account for about 11 million premature deaths annually.  

The toll in Canada is also large: A recent Canadian study noted the dominant Canadian dietary pattern is “high in fast foods, carbonated drinks, refined grains, solid fat, and processed meat” and found that “poor dietary pattern is the leading risk factor for loss of life years at the national level”, ahead of smoking, physical inactivity, and alcohol consumption.

The study looked at the effect of five different healthy diet patterns (e.g. the Mediterranean diet) compared to eating the usual Canadian diet. Depending on which healthy diet pattern was being examined, between a quarter and nearly 40 percent of all deaths among Canadian men and between 9 and 23 percent of deaths among women “were attributable to poor dietary patterns.”

The economic costs are also very large. A 2018 study looked at the costs of unhealthy eating in Canada; our collective failure to meet recommendations for five protective foods (vegetables, fruit,  whole grains, milk, and nuts and seeds) and three harmful foods (processed meat,  red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages).

The authors found this resulted in direct health care costs of $5.1 billion and indirect costs (due to early death or disability) of $8.7 billion. But that is an under-estimate because the costs of some chronic disease were not included, nor, importantly, did they include the costs associated with salt, fibre or fat.

It’s not as if we don’t know what makes for a healthy diet. The revised Canada Food Guide, issued in 2019, focused on a more plant-based diet, more whole grains, replacing meats, poultry and dairy products that are high in saturated fat, free sugars or sodium with healthier, less salty, sweet or fatty products, including plant-based protein foods, and reducing our intake of highly processed products and sugary drinks.

And yet large parts of the food industry are dedicated to producing and selling precisely the unhealthy diet – high in fast foods, carbonated drinks, refined grains, solid fat, and processed meat – that we know is causing all these deaths, illnesses and costs. In fact, they spend a huge amount of money on marketing these products, and as I will discuss next week, lobby energetically to prevent changes that would be good for health but perhaps bad for their bottom line.

A 2022 study of food and beverage advertising in Canada noted such marketing “has been identified as a powerful determinant of dietary intake and weight.” The researchers found that in 2019 “an estimated $628.6 million was spent on . . . food and beverage advertising in Canada”, two thirds of which was on television. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that 87 percent of that advertising was for “products and brands classified as ‘unhealthy’”, while only 2.1 percent was spent on marketing fruit and vegetables and less than 1 percent on water.

Also unsurprisingly, a 2019 study of trends in fast-food offerings in the United States from 1986 to 2016 found “broadly detrimental changes in fast-food restaurant offerings over a 30-year span including increasing . . . portion size, energy, and sodium content” – it is not likely to be very different here in Canada.

Indeed, a recent study found that while sodium (salt) intake in Canada is down from 2004 it is still well above the level needed for good health. Moreover, the voluntary sodium reduction strategy adopted by Health Canada in 2012 was ineffective, with only 13 of 94 food categories meeting the 2016 sodium reduction targets.

Also unsurprisingly, a 2015 review by the respected Cochrane Collaborative found  “people consistently consume more food and drink when offered larger‐sized portions, packages or tableware than when offered smaller‐sized versions.”

In short, a large part of the food industry is producing and marketing an unhealthy diet, at great cost to the health of Canadians. Moreover, as I will discuss next week, the way our food is grown is also often harmful to both the planet and to people.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

The food industry – good for health, or bad for health?

• Published as “Reaching goal of Zero Hunger includes improving affordability of healthy food”

Besides ending hunger, Zero Hunger includes improving nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture

Dr. Trevor Hancock

13 February 2024

698 words

The tobacco industry sells a product that when used exactly as intended prematurely kills half its users – 7 million people every year – as well as indirectly killing a further 1.3 million non-smokers, making it the worst mass killer in human history. Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion is estimated to kill 8 million people annually, but threatens far greater damage as a result of climate change.

So what are we to think about the food industry, when unhealthy diets result in an estimated 11 million deaths annually? This is according to a comprehensive study published in The Lancet in 2019. The authors found “the leading dietary risk factors for mortality are diets high in sodium [salt], low in whole grains, low in fruit, low in nuts and seeds, low in vegetables, and low in omega-3 fatty acids”, and extolled the virtues of “shifting diet from unhealthy animal-based foods (eg, red meat and processed meat) to healthy plant-based foods.”

Now there is no question that the food industry, which is largely in the private sector, is a major contributor to health across the world by keeping most of us fed, and mostly fairly well fed. But there are major problems with our food system, both globally and here in Canada, that need to be addressed.  At a 2023 UN Food Systems Summit, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated: “Although global food production of calories has kept pace with population growth, the common prioritization of quantity and profitability over nutritional value has meant healthy diets remain unaffordable for over 40 percent of the world’s population.”

Goal 2 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, agreed to by Canada and all the world’s nations in 2015, is Zero Hunger by 2030. But we are a long way  from achieving that goal, and headed in the wrong direction. Addressing the UN Food Systems Summit, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted “the number of people facing hunger and food insecurity has risen since 2015, exacerbated by the pandemic, conflict, climate change and growing inequalities.”

He reported that “258 million people in 58 countries faced acute food insecurity in 2022, an increase of 34 percent compared to 2021”, adding that “45 million children suffered from wasting.” Moreover, projections show that by 2030 600 million people – 7% of the world’s population – will be hungry, he added.

But the Zero Hunger goal is not just about hunger; it is, fully stated, to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. The second target under this Goal is to end all forms of malnutrition. Now malnutrition takes two main forms that co-exist globally: Under-nutrition, when people can’t access or afford adequate food, and over-nutrition, when their food supply is excessive and unhealthy.

The WHO reported at the Summit that “2.4 billion people suffer from food insecurity, while 670 million adults live with overweight or obesity” and that “478 million children aged under 5 [are] impacted by stunting, while 145 million 5-9 year olds live with overweight/obesity.”

Moreover, the production of food is often done in ways that harm the environment. Hence target 4 of the Zero Hunger goal is concerned with creating ecologically sustainable food production systems. But here too, we have a long way to go. In his remarks at the Summit, Guterres noted: “current food systems continue to generate pollution and degrade soil, water and air, contribute to 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, are responsible for as much as 80 percent of biodiversity loss and account for up to 70 percent of freshwater use.”

The WHO’s Director of Nutrition and Food Safety, Dr Francesco Branca, proposed a three-point agenda for food systems transformation: lower the cost of nutritious foods for consumers, increase the availability and affordability of healthy diets, and ensure a fair price for the producer, while reflecting the true costs on environment, health and livelihoods.

While this requires that governments take action on these important steps, it is particularly the responsibility of the food industry to stop producing and selling the unhealthy foods that lie behind those 11 million deaths a year, and stop producing food in environmentally harmful ways. That will be my focus next week.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

If a draft framework is adopted, the B.C. government would commit to the conservation and management of ecosystem health and biodiversity as an overarching priority

Dr. Trevor Hancock

6 February 2024

699 words

As far back as 1964, Paul Sears, an eminent American ecologist and former chair of the graduate program in Conservation at Yale University, described ecology as “a subversive subject” and asked “if taken seriously as an instrument for the long-run welfare of mankind, would it endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies, whatever their doctrinal commitments.”

Several years later Murray Bookchin, who developed the concept of social ecology, suggested the true subversiveness of ecology is seen when it is applied to the cultural, social, political and economic situation of humankind as human ecology, for then “ecology is intrinsically a critical science – in fact critical on a scale that most radical systems of political economy failed to attain.”

That, of course, is why Green politics is so threatening to the established order. It simply does not accept the ‘givens’ – the core values – of modern society: The primacy of the economy, the belief in perpetual growth and the accumulation of more and more ‘stuff,’ humanity’s domination of and separation from nature, the valuing of the ‘wants’ of the individual over the greater needs of the community, and all that follow from those core beliefs.

But what if we changed our core beliefs? What if we believed:

• Humans do not dominate but are entirely dependent upon nature, of which they are but one small part?
• Perpetual economic growth on a finite planet is, as Kenneth Boulding, a former President of the American Economic Association, suggested way back in 1973, something only a madman or an economist would believe in?
• We can’t have all our selfish wants met, but have to recognise we are part of a community where everyone’s basic needs must be met first?
• The source of happiness is not to be found in the accumulation of even more stuff, that enough is indeed enough?

It seems something is afoot in the body politic and the halls of government, something that might challenge those core beliefs and subvert the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies: Ecology. Taken seriously and applied to our society, it challenges our current system, which we can see has created massive and rapid global ecological change and high levels of inequality.

Slowly, haltingly, governments and international organisations, including the United Nations, have been groping towards these new core beliefs and values. And now we may be seeing it in B.C., with the publication of the draft B.C. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework, public comment on which just closed. It is, if taken seriously and implemented, an astonishing document with dramatic implications for government, and for that matter the governance of society and communities as a whole.

The draft framework is commendably clear: If adopted, the B.C. government would commit “to the conservation and management of ecosystem health and biodiversity as an overarching priority and will formalize this priority through legislation and other enabling tools that apply to . . . all sectors.”

An overarching priority, note, and one to be applied to all sectors, not just natural ecosystem and

resource management. The draft framework then lists the sectors it would be applied to: forestry, agriculture, fisheries and aquaculture, energy and mines, oil and gas, tourism, recreation, transportation and housing” (I would add urban development and infrastructure), as well as “other sectors that benefit from biodiversity . . . including health, finance, education, research, training, and innovation.”  

In his opening message, Minister Nathan Cullen notes: “Healthy ecosystems and biodiversity are not only essential for our individual health and wellbeing, but they also ensure that ecosystems, economies, and communities throughout B.C. can flourish.” So if we add ‘equitable human wellbeing’ as an overarching priority we have the two key overarching priorities that will make B.C. a Wellbeing Society.

Note in particular that the finance sector is included; we can’t have a Wellbeing Society without a budget focused on human, social and ecological wellbeing. Note also that the framework recognises that “changing our ways  . . . is complex and challenging and requires all government bodies at all levels to be actively involved” – so this is also about municipal governments, school boards, health authorities and so on. Could B.C. be about to radically transform governance?

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

 University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “Fossil-fuel industry doubling down, pushing for growth”

In the U.S., the Biden administration approved nearly 10,000 oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in its first three years, while Donald Trump is moronically pledging to “drill baby, drill”

Dr. Trevor Hancock

30 January 2024

701 words

Last week I documented the massive impact of the fossil fuel industry on people and the planet, an impact the industry generally ignores or downplays in its rush to make money and maintain its power, earning it the title of  ‘the new tobacco’.

But astonishingly, in light of the clear and strong evidence of the environmental and health impacts of fossil fuels, the industry and its private sector and government supporters are in many cases doubling down on the harm it does by pushing for growth in fossil fuel production and use.

The 2023 Production Gap Report from a group of leading environmental organisations, including the UN Environment Programme and Canada’s International Institute for Sustainable Development, noted “government plans and projections would lead to an increase in global coal production until 2030, and in global oil and gas production until at least 2050.”

Overall, they report: “Governments, in aggregate, still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C.” Canada is one of the 20 petrostates highlighted in the report that plans expansion of fossil fuel extraction.

Private sector support comes in the form of investments from banks, pension and investment funds. The 2023 Banking on Climate Chaos report found $669 billion in fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest banks in 2022 alone and USD $5.5 trillion in the seven years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Since these levels “are fundamentally incompatible with a safe climate”, the report says, the banks are “choosing profits over a livable future.”

Troublingly, the report finds “the Royal Bank of Canada ranks #1 as the worst financier of fossil fuels. RBC provided fossil fuel companies $41 billion in 2022, an increase over its 2021 financing, making for a total of $252.5 billion since 2016.”

Governments are also major supporters of the industry. In the USA, the Biden administration approved nearly 10,000 oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in its first three years, while Donald Trump is moronically pledging to ‘drill baby, drill”. Meanwhile, in the UK, Rishi Sunak has pledged to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves.

The Canada Energy Regulator’s 2023 Energy Outlook report projects that under current measures Canada’s oil production would increase 25 percent by 2035 and then remain roughly constant to 2050, while gas production rises steadily to be 24 percent above 2022 levels by 2050. The federal and provincial governments continue to support the industry by expanding pipelines, and approving new offshore oil projects and LNG export terminals, while Pierre Poilievere idiotically pledges to ‘axe the [carbon] tax’ and undermine climate policy, cheered on by the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments.

This government support, we are supposed to believe, has nothing to do with the millions of dollars the fossil fuel industry spends on lobbying and advertising – of course not! The scale of lobbying undertaken by the fossil fuel industry to support their ongoing production tells its own tale – although it also hints at the weakness of their case and the growing challenge they face in making it.

The Guardian reported that almost 2,500 fossil fuel lobbyists were accredited to the COP28  meeting in Dubai in December, more than all but two countries (Brazil and the UAE) – yet even so, for the first time in almost 30 years, the COP final statement dared to include the term ‘fossil fuels’. In Canada, a recent analysis of lobbying by Environmental Defence found the industry lobbied the federal government over 1000 times in the first ten monhs of 2023

Meanwhile, here in BC, Dogwood reports that oil and gas lobbyists had more than 1,000 meetings with the B.C. government in the first nine months of 2023. According to Dogwood, Shell alone “has 20 registered lobbyists in Victoria whose job it is to convince decision-makers to greenlight Ksi Lisims”, which is a proposed new LNG plant that will need a new pipeline and produce 12 million tonnes of LNG a year.

It seems clear that if expanding fossil fuel industry profits mean inflicting harm on people and the planet, then the industry and its private sector and government supporters are just fine with that!

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

 University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Not only does it disregard the wellbeing of people and the planet in its pursuit of profit, it uses many of the same tactics — even consultants — as the tobacco industry

Dr. Trevor Hancock

23 January 2024

702 words

While the tobacco industry is the prime example of an industry that ruthlessly pursues profit regardless of the human cost, it is not alone. A number of other industries’ activities result in millions of unnecessary deaths annually, but it is the fossil fuel industry that has been labelled ‘the new tobacco’.

Not only does it blithely disregard the wellbeing of both people and the planet in its ruthless pursuit of profit and power, it does so using many of the same tactics – and even the same consultants – as the tobacco industry.  

In December 2022, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the industry has “exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before”, noting “for decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimize their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies.”

The results of that intransigence are plain to see in the extreme weather we have experienced in recent years in Canada and around the world. Earlier this month Copernicus, the European Union’s Climate Change Service, announced that 2023 was the warmest year on record, coming close to the 1.5°C above pre-industrial level that the world had pledged to work to avoid just a few short years ago. “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record”, stated Professor Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University in a January 9^th article in the Guardian. “This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts”.

The environmental and health impacts of climate heating alone are extensive and worrying. The World Health Organization has pointed to “death and illness from increasingly frequent extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, storms and floods, the disruption of food systems, increases in [infectious] diseases, and mental health issues.” In addition, the economic and social impacts of environmental changes can undermine social determinants such as employment and income.

These impacts of climate heating would be bad enough on their own, but the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a non-partisan American organization founded in 1984 by a bipartisan group of members of Congress, identifies the following impacts of fossil fuels, in addition to those related directly to climate heating: Ocean acidification, plastic pollution, air pollution, water pollution, oil spills and health issues. To this we should add habitat destruction related to fossil fuel extraction and the threat to coral reefs from higher ocean temperatures.

With respect to health issues, the Global Climate and Health Alliance noted in a July 2022 briefing “Health is impacted throughout the entire cycle of fossil fuel use . . . from extraction, through processing, transport, combustion and waste disposal.” A 2016 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists notes: “Extraction processes can generate air and water pollution, and harm local communities. Transporting fuels from the mine or well can cause air pollution and lead to serious accidents and spills. . . . Even the waste products are hazardous to public health and the environment.”

The World Health Organization estimates that outdoor air pollution alone – much of which is due to fossil fuel combustion – caused 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019, with 89% of those deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. However, a 2021 study using more recent studies and looking only at fine particulate matter from fossil fuel combustion, estimated there were 8.2 million premature deaths in 2018 due to air pollution from fossil fuel combustion, which rivals the death toll due to tobacco.  

Yet the fossil fuel industry is paying no heed, as I will show next week. It is contemptuously spitting in the face of the science and threatening the wellbeing of vulnerable people around the world, today’s children and youth and billions of people yet to be born, not to mention the stability of ecosystems and the survival of countless other species, by doubling down on growth. In this it is supported by massive and growing private sector investments and continuing support from governments.

The intransigence of the fossil fuel industry and its supporters has surely earned it the title of ‘planetary health enemy #1’.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• (Published as “Vaping products should be subject to same marketing ban as tobacco”)

Canada should ban all advertising, marketing, promotion and sponsorship involving vaping companies to avoid hooking a new generation of smokers

Dr. Trevor Hancock

16 January 2024

698 words

Tobacco is the forgotten pandemic in Canada. While much attention has been focused on the opioid overdose crisis, Covid, alcohol use and other popular issues, tobacco use remains, to this day, “the leading preventable cause of premature death in Canada”, according to a July 2023 Health Canada report.

Health Canada reports tobacco killed approximately 46,000 Canadians in 2020.  While the number of deaths is slowly declining as a result of decades of work to control tobacco – work the industry did all it could to stop, delay and weaken – this is still 1 in 7 of all deaths.  In fact, Health Canada reports, since 2000 “cigarettes have killed more than 1 million people in Canada.”

For comparison, there were almost 4,000 deaths from opioid toxicity in the first six months of 2023 (so around 8,000 deaths annually) and about 4,000 deaths death from alcohol use in 2021. In fact the tobacco industry killed more people in one year than the drug dealers killed in the seven and a half years from January 2016 to June 2023, a truly shocking fact that deserves much greater attention.

In another useful comparison, while Covid has killed about 57,000 Canadians since January 2020, in those same four years tobacco killed nearly 200,000 Canadians. That cost Canada an estimated $11.2 billion in 2020, according to a 2023 report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, with direct health costs totalling $5.4 billion.

So you would think we would be doing everything possible to stamp out this lethal industry. Indeed, the Canadian government’s Tobacco Strategy “is designed to help achieve the target of less than 5 percent tobacco use by 2035”, euphemistically known as ‘smoke-free’, and the latest data suggest we may be heading that way.

In 2022, Statistics Canada reports, only 9.3 percent of Canadians 24 and older (8.3 percent of women and 10.3 percent of men) reported daily cigarette smoking. Rates among younger people are much lower; 2.6 percent of 20 – 24 year-olds and only 1 percent of those aged 15 – 19. This suggests the Government’s target might be attainable.

But missing from the strategy is any reference to creating a tobacco-free generation by using legislation to prevent the sale and supply of tobacco to individuals born after a certain year, something that the UK government intends to do.

Meanwhile, the tobacco industry is promoting vaping as a ‘safer’ alternative, and as an aide in quitting smoking. Troublingly, the same 2022 Statistics Canada survey found that 6.5 percent of 15 – 19 year-olds and 10.1 percent of 20 – 24 year-olds reported daily use of vaping, compared to just 2 percent of those 25 and older.  Clearly, the tobacco industry has been successfully working to create a new market by targeting youth.

However, the WHO reported in December 2023 that “E-cigarettes as consumer products are not shown to be effective for quitting tobacco use at the population level. Instead, alarming evidence has emerged on adverse population health effects”, adding that ““Kids are being recruited and trapped at an early age to use e-cigarettes and may get hooked to nicotine.” Moreover, WHO adds, “Studies consistently show that young people that use e-cigarettes are almost three times more likely to use cigarettes later in life.”

The UK government is very clear on this: “Encouraging children to use a product designed for adults to quit smoking and then addicting them is not acceptable”, the government notes in its 2023  ‘Stopping the Start’ policy paper. It is time Canada applied the same rules to vaping as it does to tobacco and banned all advertising, marketing, promotion and sponsorship.  

The tobacco industry makes and sells a product that, when used exactly as intended is addictive and will kill at least half and maybe two–thirds of its users – something the British government notes no other consumer product does. It is the prime example of a tendency seen in far too many corporations; they care only about the health of their profits and not at all about the health of the public. The leaders of this industry are not people that should be accepted in society, but should be shunned, ostracised for the evil work they do.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy