Not only is poor mental health costly to manage, it also represents a large burden of human suffering and loss of human potential and — to the extent it is preventable — a tragic societal failure. So it is good to see that, finally, we are beginning to pay attention to improving the mental well-being of the population.

But let’s face it, the purpose of marketing is to persuade us to buy more of their products — why else would a business spend all that money? And therein lies perhaps the greatest danger. Because marketing feeds into and supports the dominant narrative of growth, it stimulates us to want and need more products, more “stuff.”

This is not going to make me popular with my beer-drinking, Morris-dancing friends, or with a lot of other people, I imagine, but we need to put higher taxes on alcohol and implement other proven policies that make it less accessible and less glamorous. This is the conclusion one must come to on reading the report on alcohol harm in Canada just released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information and a 2015 report by Canada’s chief public health officer.

Canada is a wealthy country, and within Canada, B.C. is a wealthy province. And yet we have levels of child poverty that are shameful, that exert a terrible toll on the health of children, and that blunt our human and social development. If it is true that the worth…