Last week, I discussed a couple of recent global-level reports that identify serious problems with our current economic system. In particular, the UN Environment Programme, in its 2026 report…
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In a recent article in the Hill Times, I noted that while Prime Minister Mark Carney was right to identify a rupture in the world in his Davos speech, he focused on the wrong rupture. The rupture he focused on — the geopolitical state of the world — is a minor inconvenience compared to the drastic impact…
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As readers of this column know, I often refer to a piece of wisdom put forth by the World Wide Fund for Nature in 2014: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work any other way round.”
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Largely lost in the flurry of pre-Christmas distractions was a Dec. 10 announcement from the Greater Victoria Naturehood that the Capital Regional District board had approved a staff recommendation to prepare nomination documents designating Greater Victoria a UNESCO urban biosphere region.
Read moreAnother COP, another cop-out! As anyone who pays the slightest attention to the news must know by now, COP30, the annual global climate change jamboree — this year in Belem, Brazil — ended, yet again, more with a whimper than a bang.
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It is said that, during the First World War, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau remarked that generals always prepare to fight the last war. Regrettably, it seems that this also applies to governments trying to manage our society.
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Prime Minister Mark Carney wants Canada to be an energy superpower, including in “conventional energy” (read fossil fuels). Far from being the climate-action champion we expected him to be, he seems to have swallowed his principles…
Read moreFood Banks Canada just released its annual report on poverty in Canada. Its key findings are that one in 10 Canadians are living in poverty, over 40 per cent are paying more than 30 per cent of their income…
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Last week I suggested we need a national People’s Well-being Commission to craft a new vision for Canada, one focused on how we become a society committed to equitable health now and for future generations while living within planetary boundaries.
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Last month I noted a growing recognition that the many challenges we face, from environmental degradation to concentration of wealth, structural inequality and exclusion, are a product of the economic and other societal systems we have created.
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Mark Carney may not have called his Bill C-5 — now the Building Canada Act — a big, beautiful bill, but it does come out of much the same mould as Trump’s bill. Essentially, it says we can and must grow our way…
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I wish I could take credit for the term “Dysfunction-by-the-Sea,” but longtime readers of this newspaper will recognize it was Jack Knox’s acerbic term for Greater Victoria. But while Jack has retired — and is much missed…
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Some may consider Prime Minister Mark Carney to be an economic guru, but he is either ignorant of or chooses to ignore two fundamental truths in his rush to build the nation by growing the economy.
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What can Canada learn from other countries about achieving well-being, happiness and a good quality of life? As the 2023 World Happiness Report noted, people “increasingly think of well-being as the ultimate good,” and…
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Back in the late 1980s, the first President Bush expressed a wish for a kinder, gentler nation. A joke going around at the time, I recall, was that he had found it — it was called Canada and now he was going to buy it. Fast forward almost 40 years and the U.S. has a president whose whole approach seems…
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This month, I turn to an aphorism that became popular in the 1970s — “we do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.” Often attributed to Duwamish Chief Seattle in the 19th century and seemingly popularized by American novelist, poet and activist Wendell Berry in the early 1970s, this is…
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I have spent much of my life working as an educator, whether as a professor teaching graduate students or as an in international consultant working with communities, organizations and governments around the world. Over the years…
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When I look back over the length of my career, it is clear that in many ways we have created a healthier future. One important indicator is life expectancy. According to Our World in Data, in 1970…
Read moreIn my concluding major paper for my master’s degree at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s, I identified two major principles that have guided my career ever since. The first is ecological sanity…
Read moreIt’s global conference season, and once again the corporate sector is spending huge amounts of money — money that comes from us when we purchase their products and services — to lobby for their own…
Read moreThanks to tens of millions of Americans who just voted to turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare, we now have to deal with the consequences of a second Trump presidency. Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is not only a fascist who is a threat to democracy in America, as two former generals…
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Over 40 years ago, in the early 1980s, I co-led a major report on “Our Chemical Society” for the City of Toronto’s Department of Public Health. In it, we sought to step back from what we called the “chemical of the day” problem — so many chemicals of concern, so many requests to look at them…
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There was a lot of attention paid in the recent election campaign to the provincial deficit, by which various politicians and commentators meant the budgetary deficit. But important though that might be, there is another deficit that is much more concerning, and yet largely ignored…
Read moreLast month, Planetary Boundaries Science, an international partnership of Earth scientists based out of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published the first of what will be an annual Planetary Health Check. It makes for grim, if unsurprising, reading.
Read moreCarbon pricing is a form of pollution pricing. But air pollutants from fossil-fuel combustion and greenhouse-gas emissions from a variety of sources are not the only forms of pollution we face. And pollution pricing itself is just one aspect of the broader field of full cost accounting.
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It is very clear that pollution causes harm. Oxford Reference defines it as “contamination or undesirable modification of soil, food, water, clothing, or the atmosphere by a noxious or toxic substance,” adding that “any form of pollution can have adverse effects on health.”
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By proclaiming that the carbon tax “is an existential threat to our economy and our way of life” and that it threatens a “nuclear winter” for the economy, Pierre Poilievre has entered the world of full-on craziness and inverted logic. The reality is exactly the opposite. The “carbon tax” — actually…
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I was born in 1948, when the average annual atmospheric CO2 level was about 311 ppm. When I started writing this column in December 2014, average annual CO2 was 399 ppm. Today, it is 422 ppm. The impacts of these heightened CO2 levels, as well as increased levels of methane…
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Recently, I have been discussing the large-scale changes we need to make in the face of the eight critical shifts identified in the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report Navigating New Horizons. Those changes are a focus on intergenerational equity; a new social contract that reinforces shared values about how we relate not only to…
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In addition to a commitment to intergenerational equity, which I discussed last week, the recent UN Environment Programme report Navigating New Horizons also calls for “a new social contract reinforcing shared values that unite us rather than divide us” and “a new global emphasis on well-being metrics…
Read moreLast week, I summarized five of the eight critical shifts identified in a recent UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, Navigating New Horizons, which is “a global foresight report on planetary health and human well-being.” I also touched on a sixth critical shift: persistent and widening inequalities.
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The UN Environment Programme’s new report Navigating New Horizons, produced in partnership with the International Science Council, is not easy reading. It’s not just that it is a dense 100-page document, but because it paints a grim picture of the challenges we face.
Read moreIn exploring the need for a transformation of our values so they are fit for purpose in the 21st century, I have been using a piece of “scripture” from the World Wide Fund for Nature’s 2014 Living Planet Report. The third realm from my piece of “scripture” is the economy, and the text makes an important but often overlooked point…
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In my time, I have co-founded a number of organizations, but I am particularly proud to have helped start CAPE — the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment — 30 years ago. Three of us, independently, had started to develop the idea of some sort of doctors’ organization…
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In a very real sense, we are indeed separated from nature. In North America we are 80 per cent urbanized and we spend 90 per cent of our time indoors — and a further five per cent in cars and other vehicles. So we — and especially our children — have very little contact with nature, and most of that is…
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Back in April, I was asked to be the homilist at the First Unitarian Church just before Earth Day and to talk about the values revolution that is needed. Now I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even know there was such a a beast as a homilist…
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My colleague Paul Kershaw is a professor of public health at UBC and founder of Generation Squeeze, a “Think and Change Tank” that promotes wellbeing for all generations. It does so “by turning evidence into action and rejuvenating democracy to protect what is sacred for younger and future generations…
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A team led by Prof. Martin Wagner of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recently reported that of 16,000 chemicals associated with plastic, at least 4,200 “are of concern because of their high hazards to human health and the environment.”
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Monday is Earth Day, and the theme this year is Planet vs. Plastics. This is timely, because Tuesday marks the start of a week-long session in Ottawa of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. So this week, I begin to look at the plastics industry…
Read moreThe Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto just released a report on another industry that in various ways harms health — gambling. Not only can it be addictive and harmful to health and social wellbeing, its impact is disproportionately experienced by low-income people…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.”
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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.
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Indeed, in a wide variety of ways, the private sector is what I called producers of health — they build our homes, grow our food, produce beneficial medicines, create good jobs and provide many other important determinants of health.
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More than a quarter-century ago, I wrote an article called “Caveat Partner” about the problematic aspects of public health creating partnerships with the private sector.
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The end of the year is always a time for reflection, but more so this past year, which has been significant for me in four key ways. First and foremost, I turned 75. That’s three-quarters of a century, and that’s given me pause for thought — I really am getting old!
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It’s that time of year, when Charles Dickens’ story of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Cratchit family is everywhere. But it’s not just a charming story of how a mean old curmudgeon sees the light and becomes a kindly old gent and a generous benefactor to his employee, Bob Cratchit.
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