all right so good afternoon everyone.
We'll get started. I want to welcome you to the health law Institute's seminar
series and to acknowledge first that we were that we are on me ancestral and
unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq and we honor the Mi'kmaq people who have taken
care of this land and we acknowledge that we live and create on these lands
in the spirit of taking care of them for all. My name is Joanna Erdman and I'm
the associate director of the health law Institute here at Dalhousie and I want
to welcome you again to our seminar series.

This is a series that's really a
platform for sharing research and ideas on health law and policy and it's my
real pleasure to introduce two of Dalhousie own who are here with us
today professor Katherine Roth from the
Faculty of Health and Professor Jamie Baxter from a faculty of law they are a
rather perfect pairing of health and law for our series and they will share some
ideas on scale and community health in food law and it was labeled here an
armchair conversation between law and public health and they note that the
chairs have no arms but indeed I think they'll make it work so yeah join me in
welcoming them. Thanks Joanna and thanks to you thanks to the Health Law Institute for having us today so Kathy and I when we got together to
talk about this this talk we kind of envisioned it in the nature of a an
armchair conversation and I think kind of true to form that's what really hoping
it'll be and so we haven't had a set of questions that we threw
around and talked about before this and we're going to
sort of used those in a couple of case studies to really kind of tackle this
question about when we use law to promote health and reduce nutritional
disparities how should we determine the appropriate scale of those interventions
regulations and so forth so maybe just by way of introduction I'll just say a
couple of things to frame what is we're going to talk about one of them has to do with the kind of food law piece and one of them has to do with scale so this
as Joanna said this is kind of a nice pairing for us because i'm a law person
but not a health law person in fact in my training Kathy is a physician in that
and a public health researcher and so it's really an attempt to kind of talk
across I guess disciplinary boundaries and in kind of fields those are the
questions that we're both interested in which both center around food in
particular and food law is a kind of burgeoning area within the legal field
it's really connected I think a very disciplinary way others are interested
in food and we have a lot of questions within that community about how to
define that as a legal field and these questions around the scale and probably
on the central thinking through some of those questions it was a conference in
November in Toronto in which that was the major theme of that particular
conference which kind of spurred us to think about this team the other kind of
framing piece is why we're talking about scale
and what we mean you know when we say scale is a kind of basis for this
conversation and I think the outside as you may see is we don't actually have a
precise definition for you about scale and in fact there may be different ways
of thinking about that concept from a legal perspective and from a public
health perspective but a couple of basic points might just help us all kind of
have common ground one is that we kind of use and business
penetrating on how joggers tend to think about these concepts
Yeti's of space kind of physical space is really important to scale but also
time so we can think about different scales of space and zooming in tuning
out on physical space and as well time short durations of time
raishin zat time and the scale dimensions of that we can also even
think about quantitative scale the kind of Google map version even focusing on
that particular house in the neighborhood or way out on a world map
but also in this idea all the same scale that there's a real difference from even
understanding you know a city for example by looking at a map with that
city or reading a travel writers in there and description of that walking
around right the same area of the world is it work but from very different
quality of perspectives and what that scales are heavy so just give you a
couple ways I think it with that and then Kathy has some points about oh and
also just for the and so first of all thank you for having me over here today
just to go on to what you were saying in terms of some initial concepts for
anyone who does have a health or public health background or it's been in my F
genealogy class the trip the classic epidemiological triad is person come on
site with me person time which are kind of the three parameters by which we
think of how to describe population collect data around populations and
think of also about the interventions that we might put in place to improve
the health of those populations so yeah okay so I'm gonna start with just a few
assumptions just at the front because I thought you know we're going to I think
we're gonna roam pretty far and wide with this conversation so I thought we'd
all start from a common starting point so the first piece of it is that diet
related factors now comprise the leading risk factor for death and disability
globally and it's nearly it's one or two in Canada
I made or so only related to tobacco which sometimes is receiving so the
first assumption is that we believe this is true and that we we've read the
health evidence on it and the second is that we're all interested in achieving a
state of health so we also take that as a starting point
that that's a common interest of us all in the room the second thing is that
there is a presence that we take as true that there is a presence of disparities
in health as well as opportunities to achieve health when we're talking about
society or our community environments and economies and that the third thing
is that those economies and environments are something that we have put in place
through collective action but that themselves have characters and features
as opportunity structures outside of the humans that operate inside them okay so
some of these ideas that are there's a scale space and time support seem kind
of pretty abstract conceptual and probably that's what's kind of
interesting and cool about them but you don't even bring that down to earth we
also thought it would be helpful to talk about a couple of pan tangible case
studies in which you know kind of law has tried to intervene and produced good
health outcomes and how scale has really influenced you know how we've approached
those how they've been resolved or not and so forth so it will just do a good
description of those cases before we get and so the first one that we're really
highlighting is the recently failed federal Senate bill s two to eight which
is a marketing to kids restriction this died on the order paper just prior to
the election and 2019 so we're going to unearth that a little bit there are two
versions of the bill so that anyone who is a student and law student on this on
today at the benefit of receiving the readings in advance as you you will have
seen the two versions of the bill and we're going to debate whether they went
in the right direction the wrong direction with the alterations to the
bill etc and then as I kind of alternative way of thinking about scale
to this kind of problem we haven't kind of matched a case as it were a recent
case coming out of Montreal in which there the municipal government enacted a
set of maybes controls voting restrictions on fast-food restaurants in
proximity to schools and so you know if you think about the basic policy problem
is being how to regulate kids access to your exposure to unhealthy foods or
acknowledge your advertising those one way to think through that and from a
scale perspective is according to jurisdiction of scale right that on the
Senate bills the unhealthy advertising regulations were a matter of kind of
federal regulation the recent case in Montreal which these deliberations were
upheld by the exterior court as well as local government law and so one of the
ways in which we'll talk about scale think about scale is as a jurisdictional
matter between no local law national law of course we can also think about the
kind of global dimension of that the second case study then is a second set
kind of parallels on the national and local is a set of regulations around
shark-finning or restrictions under start fitting a
practice that particular animal rights activists and
lawyers have long advocated for restrictions on through a set of kind of
fail federal issues to ban on the import and export of shark fins federal level
that failed and then in 2011 the Toronto City Council enacted a ban on the
possession consumption and sale of shark written products within the Toronto
based out in the City of Toronto now sharpens our culinary items every as
I can especially the item to make a particular shark fin soup and Toronto's
then enacted this ban to try to prevent those practices as well as any
transactions drug sharpens that ban was struck down by the Ontario Superior
Court is being outside of the jurisdiction of the local government of
Toronto and then in two thousand just last year in the summer we get a
successful federal ban on shark finning that finally goes through it so again
the dynamics between and then for both sets of those themes so around the scale
of the governance but in terms of thinking about federal and local as well
as the potential interventions or infringement upon the players at hand
we've also unearthed and we'll talk a little bit about the classic charter
case Irwin toy that upheld Quebec restriction on advertising to children
so Quebec is the only jurisdiction in Canada to have a substantive piece of
legislation that restricts all commercial advertising directed towards
children so notably this is not all food advertising it's all advertising period
it's specifically defined as advertising and
toy and in the legislation and we're going to talk about kind of how our one
toy holds up now in the face of contemporary evidence as well as our
understanding of marketing and what it is and how it affects children and
children's health and then the last one would you may not get to but as a 38 we
often keep a lot of item to the scale issues and health outcomes is there food
safety and just last year the federal government passed the safe food for
Canadians food regulations which are a kind of omnibus attempt to bring
together several different regulatory regimes and regulate health food safety
across several different kind of areas of food processing and production and so
we have time we may come back to that one and this one the last one is also a
bit near near to both of us as people who are heavily invested in our local
food system and food enterprises a lot of our research and the food policy lab
and health is about retail food environments so small and large retail
food businesses and how they might be differentially affected by policy and
the law so this kind of leads us to thinking kind of different three are
categories we're going to use to try to run these case studies one is the kind
of jurisdictional questions and thinking about scale and how it relates to legal
jurisdiction the second is the question of scale and scope of the intervention
and the different dimensions that could comprise you know we didn't let say any
level jurisdiction how we might you know regulate or intervene to
address these challenges and then finally it's got me mentioning the idea
of scale enterprise when we think about you know who is the kind of regulatory
subjects how does the size I was an economy of scale as the size of business
business from big to small from nation or global to local impact the way that
we record and this is very much thinking in progress the driver for this format
is that Jamie and I sat down together to start talking about these various issues
we realized that we both unearthing this are no personal knowledge and research
knowledge of these cases and I thought you know oh I really enjoy just talking
to Jamie as a lawyer about this so I hope that I can kind of asked a me some
questions in front of you all and for the record on and then conversing
questions are can be as efficient in public health professional and so the
ideas describe you know just kind of talk back and forth a little bit about
how to figure these things out we don't have a particular set of answers or
insights for you but hopefully in the discussion itself okay so in terms of
scale of governance I think there's several different ways that we can
probably think about how you know scale governance of this question of
jurisdiction really kind of plays out but one thing maybe then we can start by
talking a little bit out and thinking about the child baptized and regulations
and this local land use case I talked about it in Montreal is sort of what's
different about kind of regulating at these different scales and and one
question I have reviewed by the committee started off and is thinking a
little bit about this morning Gabby was from the perspective of public health is
the different kind of way in which something like expert knowledge right
plays out at different jurisdictional scales right so we talk about your own
toy case and the way in which you know we kind of see different evidence being
brought to bear there and thinking about how a public health professional would
you know want to craft the ideal regulation and I what scale may be a
very different answer than how the law kind of police's you know those kinds of
regulations into absolutely so why don't I talk a little bit about the parameter
of the scale of what's being governed in terms of urban toy and then I'll
introduce the two versions of the bill of the Senate bill so the key parameters
in that case were in Irwin toy it was the the government of Quebec within the
context of its of really protection of commercial protection in terms of
preserving the rights of consumers within a within a within that context
and to protect what was really a vulnerable population and the vulnerable
population defined at that time was children 13 years and under and the
nature of the the harmful kind of exposure was deemed to be advertising
but again like I really want to point out that it wasn't necessarily because
of food although subsequent public health people have interpreted in that
way really around the food and nutrition outcomes at the time it was really the
idea that all advertising as by nature manipulative to that vulnerable
population of that vulnerable child population so when the if we look at the
two versions of the Senate bill and think about the the federal scale the
federal government had declared healthy eating strategy and embedded in the
minister's letter was a promise to address childhood obesity including a
number of healthy eating policy initiatives that were related to this
and restricting marketing of food and beverages to children was defined as
part of enacting that healthy eating strategy on the part of the federal
government so it was really the idea of the scope of all children in Canada
that children in Canada were facing a a major house problem which was defined
specifically as obesity and we can talk a little bit about that like whether
that's kind of a scope of the problem that we want to define and that the
federal government could very much do something about this problem of
childhood obesity by protecting children from advertising or from marketing and
the the age level that was set at the first version of the bill was 13 years
of age by the third version of the bill it was or the amendments to the bill I
switched that to 17 years of age that was determined that the age of
vulnerability was 17 and under the definition of marketing was increased
from only advertisements to all forms of marketing acknowledging that how diverse
the marketing has become and the marketing with the exception of
trademarks which were removed as a particular area that would not be
covered by the bill right and it wonder given the experience you know of the
bill itself they kind of dies on the order paper if you had to kind of advise
you know on on how to achieve this outcome
do you sell confidence that that federal scale is the right way to do it or do
you think that there is other scales of governance that you are printing works
yeah so this is exactly where where you raise the alternative you you so there's
a number of if we want to actually if we want to promote the health of children
through providing access to healthier food one way to do it is to restrict
exposure to unhealthy exposures and that wasn't the intent of the bill but
another way is at the local scale which was the example that you raise
material and so one of the things that's really interesting about that kind of
comparison of you know this initiative it kind of dies in the federal level and
then one that in every state gets upheld at the local level you have this
question in the various reporters then do we take a lesson from this to be well
we ought to focus our energy on cities right as opposed to you know advocating
in a national level now you know we could talk a little bit about like the
kind of pros and cons of that kind of strategic perspective in light of how
the law approaches it from you know from from this point in time certainly it
would seem that a national initiative you know with national reach is the most
effective kind of strategy right that a municipal or many municipal kinds of
actions is going to play out differently in different localities it's going to
require and somebody's probably a lot more resources that kind of some kind of
coordinated approach to be able to get to some outcome you know from any big
population scale kind of effectiveness and yet the lessening of the kind of
recent cases seems to be that there's been somewhat more success at the local
level and kind of seeing some of these initiative forward and so if you can use
local land use law or zoning law to restrict children's access to fast foods
that seems in part like a kind of plausible strategy to kind of focus at
the local scale so my my question back to you jamie is how important is that
direct relationship between the outcome that we want to achieve which is
restricting and a children's exposure to this harmful item which you've defined
as unhealthy food and beverages which we would have to apply some kind of
criteria yeah how important is kind of that direct regulation of that exposure
and as compared to an indirect regulation of that exposure yeah I think
this is a really good question and one of the things that I think you get from
a reading of like local law as if it's a national law is that local law at that
scale often operates kind of silence right and so you know what zoning
restrictions do is you know purport to regulate landings in a kind of often in
a pretty neutral frame right so it's really about what may and uses can exist
in this part of the city what land uses are restricted in this part of the city
and often those laws are not very think about their particular objective
so about restricting children's access to you know unhealthy foods or fast
foods for example and and the pointy part of here is that well actually look
at law municipal law and when courts go to review missile legislation they often
accept that correct they have to accept that local law kind of operates in this
kind of sideways manner an indirect manner to get to some particular outcome
but it can do with these tools that often don't seem particularly
well-suited toward that and a big question in the montreal piece comes up
is even allowed to really regulate food as a regulatory subject right local
governments we normally think about that you know taking your garbage or about
you know preventing a high-rise building next to your single-family detached home
and we come to a regulatory subject like food courts are struggling right with
trying to understand whether or not how nice valleys even have a role in
actually regulating that particular area and the question is what is the right
kind of target I can't help but like get into our area kind of second finger a
little bit I guess to kind of stay at the
governance level too long but it's but the idea is you know is food the
appropriate subject for a municipality or should we use the other appropriate
subjects that the municipality has kind of a jurisdiction over in order to
indirectly access the food yes yes the food the problem or the solution
yeah yeah yeah I think this is a good question and I think you know in part
maybe I'll come learn about the annotation result and this kind of
particular question because you know there you get this really because all I
remember describe to you that this is the case where the City of Toronto an
active ban on sharpens as a food product right that gets consumed in Toronto gets
transact on bond sold in Toronto and you know that restaurants and employers that
work possess and all of that activity is gonna be banned under this bylaw by the
city Toronto and one of the things that the
court is doing in that case is trying to figure out what power does the
municipality have in order to kind of regulate this food product this food in
this space tour and toward what what goal and so they they move between these
different frames and this is really going to be for us today is whether this
is a health objective you know and in the city of Toronto's empowering statute
it says that the City of Toronto can regulate for the health and well-being
of people that live in Toronto or is this a kind of environmental regulation
is this about the health of people in Toronto or is it about the
sustainability of shark populations in far-off oceans right here we see another
dimension of scale really playing into this question of which is the
intersection right which is and also like can a city deal with a problem like
this through regulating food that is ultimately at least in big part about
regulating something that doesn't even happen within the territorial boundaries
of the municipality right and so what the court does in hand is it uses that
idea about territory about space to kind of push down in this valley the
cabinet's jurisdiction and say no you can't regulate sharks and for our oceans
that has nothing to do with the city and the city is responding their arguments
are very much in the ground it has everything to do with the city in part
because one you know sharks are apex predators and if we drive sharks a
distinction that's going to have dramatic local environments of
consequences for everyone including people that live in Toronto and to
people and try to eat a lot of fish and so even if we're not talking about and
are uncertain about the kind of catastrophic impacts of shark
populations if it's just really about oceans you know you can't buy the salmon
Jovi's down the road then people in Toronto are still affected use their
food and so forth now none of those arguments
we have for the court because they simply regard this as a matter of space
all right if you were either outside or inside the city altogether so if there
does this to a world arrogance and the public or the city argument was very
when I when I read and with the public health kind of glasses to it it really
occurred to me that this is the type of argument like the city was making
arguments that public health people made make all the time which alerted me that
this is actually a pitfall part potentially in our public health
reasoning which was the city argue that because citizens of Toronto were local
residents but also you know global residents with a part to play in the
larger global society and environment that they were that there was a two-way
kind of relationship between the residents of Toronto and this global
environment and global concerns that the city had jurisdiction over but that
didn't that didn't hold out yeah exactly and I think you know partly illustrates
an interesting difference between again and coming back to our national and
local law and recently of course been very skeptical about you know this kind
of question about how municipalities can operate and what kind of concerns they
can bring within their purview as they've used these territorial
boundaries in this way to try to tap in them and and do that kind of work and
you see that really coming out and their result in may have been case despite the
fact that much of the case law over the past 20 years or so about we just Valley
as I said we already kind of pushing municipalities up we realized that
cities for example are global actors you know they're not just local actors
Toronto gets together with New York London gets together with Milan to
regulate climate change do can be involved in the Milan food packed in
which sees are contracted with one you know to try to mark out their place
in regulating the food system right skipping over spare any questions about
jurisdictions absolutely say enacting that network form of governance that we
often talk about in policy and I wanted to kind of go back also to the marketing
to kids bill that that died on their word or paper so a really contentious
aspect of the bill for which an amendment was made was the original
version of the bill prohibited all marketing of foods and beverages period
and an alteration was made to change that to unhealthy food and beverage
marketing so which leaves us kind of naturally to the question then how do we
define what constitutes unhealthy food and beverages versus healthy food and
beverages and this I think this comes up and plays into this idea of scale of
governance because adding that unhealthy food beverage the solution was actually
an administrative one it was a regulatory stage one that Health Canada
was already exploring my issues with in food labeling and also around nutrient
profiling systems recommended by other governments or that have been adopted by
other governments or that have been proposed as a standard by the w-h-o and
therefore that this could be a really practical solution for addressing that
issue of unhealthy food and beverages that the definition could play right
into what was already being done and captured within federal bureaucratic or
administrative jurisdiction yeah just be open to the second slide because I think
probably we were also talking about here on the example of the food advertising
you know kind of the kind of legal frameworks that probably the Senate
almost imperative was anticipate when they were thinking about you know
the the scale in the scope of the way that these particular regulations are
being drafted and thinking back to the or enjoy peace they can use referencing
earlier that eventually it's something like just gonna have to survive a
proportionality analysis right and so in many of you just be the law students and
learning to be familiar with the proportionality analysis does to say
this stage of constitution review under the Charter once a rights infringement
has been found so engage ruin TOI infringement upon rights of free speech
whether my that's a justified infringement in a free and democratic
society and integral to that analysis is a proportionality analysis at work calls
and the basic point here is that from our lens you know personality is all
about scale right it's about scaling the different elements of the benefits and
harms as it were the benefits of the state action in these cases the harms to
the right on the individual and the finding is where the target of the
individual in first place is 13 years old and on there is at 17 years older
another and so forth and so the perversity of McNally analysis in Irwin
toy and is in this case you can imagine is operating is using scale right to
kind of calibrate and decide ultimately the validity or constitutionality of
these attacks and the pieces that are often going to pull together in public
health formulations I think but that really are very much separated when we
take a lot of perspective to it are the pieces of the target of the legislation
as compared to the beneficiary of the regulation so when I talk about the
target of an intervention or talk about the target of a policy in public health
class then I often talk about really what we're talking about is whose
behavior are we inducing to change so and in the case of an advertising
restriction it's really we're infringing upon
corporations as a person that their freedom of expression but
that's justified because but the beneficiaries are intended to be the
children the benefits will accrue to the children so the question also to me from
a public health perspective is who's whose harms kind of matter more and to
what extent do we believe in the magnitude of harm to each party that
seems to be really important and that there is I think when the courts go to
answer those questions often give you just one example of a kind of parent
tension in the way that the law comes to that point to go from a section one else
right so we were talking earlier the idea is you only know the kind of
section 1 jurisprudence there are these two elements to that analysis right it's
about the rational connection between the regulatory action and outcome and
then there is minimal impairments on the right and so the rational middle
impaired piece attempts to kind of scale down or scale back the regulatory
invention lengthens tailor it to the objective that's also being that's being
realized but that rational connection piece in
the first part I think is like a sort of scaling out mechanism right that it's a
way to kind of broaden out and define exactly what it is that the legislature
is attempting to do and there's a kind of real interrelationship obviously
between those two parts of the test they're really operate along this
context of skip 1 is about how big Lee is where you find the problem with the
objective in the middle and parent pieces how closely your some scaled down
you tailor that to the potential harm account though right and so if we look
at that from a scale perspective right I think it helps us to try to understand a
little bit the interconnections between those elements of right and also I think
some of the contradictions bank parts get into when they go to actually apply
that and from a public health perspective when I when I was reading
her one toy I'm thinking about the harms element I was really struck in the
judgment that the they really didn't take up the argument that they
would be harm to the corporation um you know based on this infringement so it
was that the company had could just find another method to mark it and that's
sort of what companies do is very much part of that judgment and I found that
very revealing because that's also a very common public health argument right
there's some unknown or undefined alternative it exists yeah
yeah I mean it's also we haven't talked too much about these idea and it goes
back bit to our previous slide about the kind of interaction between you know the
kind of public authorities you might be involved in regulating this and the kind
of private sector and maybe this is a bit of a segue into our glass piece in
sort of thinking about it's a scale enterprise but just to give you an
example of you know ways which system this gets left out the story back to the
education turkmen regulation there is actually an entity or set of entities
out there in the private sector that took the lead on banning shark business
or trying to move forward restrictions on certain markets that has to do with
the transportation of those shark fins across national boundaries ending with
airline companies and so particularly some of the East Asian airline companies
that were operating in and out of the countries where there's higher demand or
shark fins enacted policies right that said they were no longer going to carry
those across national borders as part of the kind of import and export process
and so you know we're thinking about the ways in which you might build scales of
advocacy or momentum around particular issues miry device actually starts in
part with the airline's they're the first movers then coming from some of
the municipalities and they ultimately get results at the national level and
then looping Iraq up to the Senate fiddle the question is to what extent is
that private sector innovation I guess outside of having a law in place to what
extent is that effective in achieving of your overall purpose for the legislation
in the first and the argument around marketing to
children is that there has been a voluntary system of self-regulation
around companies but there's been quite a bit of public health research around
looking at the frequency and power of marketing messages communicated
underneath the context of that voluntary self-regulation and one of my public
health colleagues money content to them the University of Calvary of Ottawa has
found that actually those companies that were signatories to the voluntary
self-regulatory pledge were more likely to you advertise
or they had a greater proportion of advertising and her assessment of
children's television advertising than did other companies yeah yeah and I
think this is gonna on this theme again part of our earlier discussions about
what forms the kind of association or kind of collective action when we're
thinking about scale are actually the most kind of effective right so we asked
the first questions are the scales of governance moving out kind of brought it
and you know alternative forms and so we start thinking about all the different
possibilities of that kind of opens up our mind or makes it more alive – you
know what does alternative modes of governance are we talked about so this
is actually a really great segue I think into our last theme which is scale of
enterprise and kind of the nature of that that I'll just kind of explained
the picture that I have on here and we do retail food environment research and
this was this picture was from an interactive workshop that we did it was
an intersect oral workshop in neukölln Labrador to discuss what does a healthy
retail food environment or what does specifically a healthy corner store in
rural England and Labrador look like and we had people kind of write their sticky
notes of their ideas and then as a group we began to theme them so this was the
theme around store owner and staff action
and if you can read some of the sticky notes I think this kind of gives you an
idea of how people think of that corner store at a very scale or at level of the
of the community is it only kind of transactional or is it does it commune
does a community store provide a community service or is it about the
relationship between there's a there's one that says no judgment is it the
relationship between the store owner and the residents that shop at that store or
is it the fact that the store owner is a member of that community and their part
can speak on behalf of the community that that makes it healthy so this is
the picture yes I think your major theme of course in kind of the food world
generally whether or not it's from the public a little ego or other perspective
is really all about vocalism these days right and so what they learned it's
access to time local foods and the significance of local production in you
know our kind of communities and the economies
what are they kind of help get back some consequences one of the consequences for
things like food insecure you access to food there a lot of the discussion
centers around the logo which is of course a scalar concept here and so you
know one of the ways in which that kind of perspective on scale and it opens up
that questions is to kind of understand that when often when laws I've seen her
being and this maybe draws back to the food safety example there is very
differential effects on the scale of the enterprise for one purportedly neutral
set of regulations and so the critique in the example of the healthy food for a
food for canyons Act these new food safety regulations is that that approach
is the topic we call a kind of risk mitigating or a risk factor approach now
food processors are provided on the red with the CFIA the Canadian Food
Inspection Agency they have to take pre-emptive measures to ensure that
their businesses and went on our are safe and they have to ensure the
traceability of their food throughout the supply system now these all seem
like really good idea is they're in to be kind of upstream measures that
prevent food safety risks before that they occur but the critique right on the
scale perspective is very about this regime is very much being that this is
going to finally bias to being smaller producers right in which the regulatory
burden at this risk approach produce is disproportionately a lot on small
enterprise it's probably one that larger enterprises so there's a question
private questions is that high local businesses are smaller businesses are
going to be able to navigate these regulations and acknowledging the
differential burden has really come up in other instances of food nutrition
interventions that have come into place for example in the case of menu labeling
in Ontario it was initially proposed at a city level before it it was proposed
at the provincial level but that was very much where the parameters of menu
labeling were set so that only larger corporations would initially have to
comply but there would be programmatic mechanisms or administrative and service
mechanisms through the municipal government to enable smaller enterprises
to comply on a voluntary basis projecting that eventually it would be
more all-encompassing and a similar thing happens around seafood in the City
of Toronto around food handling regulations so the requirement for at
least one managerial and one employee staff of a food Enterprise food selling
enterprise to have food handler certification was rolled out on a staged
basis based on the scale of the enterprise and I coming back to your
earlier point about you know the responses to this exercise in the role
of things like community relationships and Trust right it's very much that
those service that kind of basis or underpinning for you know advocates of
you know kind of alternative regulatory regime sometimes so in the food safety
example that you know the reason why I consider food safe when I go to my local
farm and I buy some meat they put your know on the side or buy a mobile
abattoir that goes into that farm and it doesn't would ring is because I trust
the farmer and I know them right I have a relationship with them that's the
basis of my regime as it were but that's a very different mode of governance at a
very different scale than one that is you know provincially or nationally
enacted and once it's been fascinating for me around the marketing to kids
debate if you looking through the Hansard record of the senate committee
discussion around this it was that some of the arguments around the differential
impact for smaller businesses was often made by the largest industry
associations speaking and we're using those exemplars as an example of why the
whole piece of legislation was right and then it just as a last example kind of
dreams I'm gonna what that means is saying I think is is the best restaurant
there's only regulation he says on human control earlier with the city of
Montreal enacted restrictions on the location of fast-food restaurants near
schools one of the arguments that was made by the Restaurant Association
challenging that bylaw was that it drew this
arbitrary distinction because the zoning only applies to restaurants without
table service and so the consequence of that which is really interesting is that
that exactly regulated out Harvey's in W and McDonald's but it will have in place
the moment pop shops who were surveying and this is the point me buy the
restaurant food exactly the same food right they were serving hamburgers and
fries but if you had table service that you were you know Dave's diner then you
were captured by the regulation but because of this distinction of Exeter
they go ahead was very much kind of a weaker side because it was really about
distinction between table service or not would that exactly that form serve to
regulate the scale in the enterprise that was a catchment and then our lab
where we're actually doing a systematic review it slid body and I'm a tailor one
of our PhD students looking at how we even kind of typology stores within
Public Health Research on store environments so those those definitions
for how we define you know an unhealthy environment as a as a non table service
restaurant really matter both from evidence collection perspective but also
obviously from a legal perspective so most of the time maybe we will stop
talking ourselves and then open it up and say questions yeah because that's of course one
possible response right oh okay absolutely so the so what your furniture
is that sponsorship so for example I guess the the Tim Hortons hockey team
like sponsorship which is usually it is actually not covered or it was not
covered by that legislation or was proposed to not be covered in the latest
state of where the discussion arrives around that bill so the argument would
have been that that we would also have to invoke kind of other this would have
been a governance one where we would have had to invoke the regulatory powers
of other orders of government provinces and municipalities presumably to deal
with issues around sponsorship so yeah on the you know recreation facility
recreation facility kind of the advertising that's around a hockey arena
or on the jerseys themselves so that was that was a definitely a sticking point
but also unresolved but probably not going to be included it probably won't
be included in future versions of the Vail and inspires oh now this is also on tape
so as far as I know with this bill I think there is great interest in this
bill moving forward from many actually across many parties I think that there
is also an understanding that the direction in which the amendments went
may be created new in an attempt to address the potential looming charter
challenge I think that the amendments went in a direction that actually made
it harder to adopt a bill in the first place but that's could have a read on
the situation we we absolutely know we do know that advertising directed to
children under 13 under-16 and under-17 in some studies can influence almost
every stop step along the pathway of consumption including changing attitudes
changing perspectives around food and beverages changing purchasing intent
changing actual purchases and also changing dietary intake of those food
and beverages so there's quite a detailed there's there's detailed
evidence on all of those aspects of it and there's a nice for those who are
interested in waiting for it there is a nice systematic review of the literature
on kind of breaking down those pieces of evidence so I can also
send that around to the listserv if that's useful for people but what has
not been fully assessed in the evidence is the way that marketing has changed
and evolved so a lot of the literature to date the literature now is about 40%
of television advertising only and if we think about television advertising
that's probably I don't know it's almost the last place that you start to think
when you think about how any consumer good or service is now marketed it's
much more personalized it's it's through many many other different formats and
especially digital marketing okay yeah thanks so much for the
conversation corn that I liked it you know sometimes they listen to a
conversation you then join it in the middle and you say oh but what about
this one so so I think what's interesting is that three questions of
scale scale of governance intervention Enterprise then I noted and it got very
into the three conversations but like scale of problem like right that's a
first thing like what is this about and it's interesting I think that scale
because even in your conversation he went that the problem was from
nutritional properties to ocean flows in China think about what is the thing here
what is the nature of the underlying issue and I think you kind of it's
interesting to say it's about health or healthy foods because that is a really
big assumption to begin with versus that this is a problem with so many other
that you could pitch it at different questions at the outset so I saw the
scale of the problem is an interesting one to start and and the second question
is children are such an interesting thing and they really say things in
policy debates they are a thing the other thing I started to think about
children in a sense of scale like why focus on children
is it scale because future outlook right so like nutritional nutritional policies
really important because of the effect that we'll have over a lifetime or like
what is it a time scale thing is it a scale with respect to children because
this vulnerability question and so what is indeed the vulnerability if you think
of a place or space question with children what is the source of
vulnerability and it's quite interesting because it targets these private actors
marketers as the source of the vulnerability when in truth when we
think about children and what makes them a vulnerable class
it's not just the threat of these private marketers it's they rarely buy
their own food especially a certain age right and so
there's all this other there's family there's the parents there's the entire
school right and looking at it in orientation to school who controls
school so I wondered like children themselves is an interesting scale or
concept to think about why these food regulations have such this obsessive
quality with children I think the great points go and I think on the first one
right in terms of we're not thinking about the definition of the problem and
kind of contacts with way I started in our introduction to say so idea food or
food law right as the kind of framing for these problems is becoming you don't
want that my lawyers and researchers are recently interested in and is relatively
new to them but I always have these anxieties actually about that project in
part because it's for me kind of on this question of like what does it bring to
us to come because it's big positive defining something is a food problem to
scale it up right it makes it very big and food and we now want to talk about
food systems we don't want to just necessarily talk about disconnected use
a consumption or processing or production and or waste flows and so
forth but the normative the way in which the problem is kind of come out in you
in the complex's is when you can have a table that lends it is challenging and I
never know how to answer the question and yet they're gonna need to be
question of how you kind of did that with our more established categories of
law right which which I'll push bring their own problem definitions along with
that and so you know the idea is to give an example of you're moving between
these frames is the health question is an environmental question is it other
aspects of well-being and I think part of the you had case
abilities actually nubes we know this is part of the answer is actually no render
this by law the alter by so I guess I'm going to say that like your question I
think is about one I would say like he's I excited but what does it easy
sort of a Thompson they called food law is that a useful way about taking these
problems because of the practical lightning the practical objective also
of public houses public so there is a tendency to kind of have helpless
objective and I even kind of put that at the beginning of our of our talk today
as that's something that we assume that everyone does want to achieve but the
Ottawa Charter on health promotion said that health is not the outcome that's
desirable but health is a resource for everyday life so that health actually
converse you an advantage to function in society and to achieve all of the other
things that you would like to achieve so maybe health is not the right outcome to
be framing really I think that's what that why the earlier Quebec legislation
was successful just add one more point hundred last piece about Eva kids in
this example and so this morning my son was thinking pretend for no lavars and
he said to me that my is gluten-free but yours has process probably doesn't and I
just thought like it's have amazing actually how much he knows are like a
world which we visited about the kinds of food choices he's making is like very
different from the world I feel like I kind of grew up in it and
like you know the choice that we make is a kind of families the way that we can
regulate that level they might have actually given we came back to
jurisdiction to scale and this is where some of the log markers I think we're
kind of pushing us to think you've given your conventional Onix of national
global and local arts the insufficient we actually think about jurisdiction as
within a family for example if you think about all of these different scales and
probably what that scalar pump suppose to do is break out of these some more
formal categories I guess the other way of saying that is that scale is not
actually the same thing as jurisdiction but in we're going to assume that that's
so and even though we might think about jurisdiction as a kind of technical
concept that fits these categories we might usefully actually think about a
family as a jurisdictional aspect the descent on hermit OE says that it was
really like children grow up to be adults so you know this is a nuisance
for now but we we anticipate that this that over time kind of introducing that
time scale that we talked about where you didn't kind of really get into that
children eventually acquire those abilities so in a way that the setting
of an age to define that class the vulnerability is arbitrary now is also
recognized I think and I think that my thing of the
genealogy that is coming from grassroots one of the purposes of that concept song
I think is to break as out of these traditional dirty clothes yes right it's
a kind of highlight and also then challenge the idea that I mean normally
think about and laws role in regulating food for example is very much understand
your law right it's out on the stage arrives in that place out in wants to
think about the idea that we can regulate I think that's kind of partly
where that idea if it's already comes it is it kind of challenged it in their
decision to that part it's interesting always gonna be the big yeah you know we
have very sovereignty means from a legal perspective but my own is that this
matter that we've been meeting your that were deploying this right which is not
something that superin prior national or international context about the
relationship between nation-states it's really about the significance of
self-governance and self organization for working with so I have never quite
understood why it was pathology but I understand and another piece of the
continuum I sometimes think about that I think has not really been resolved very
well or it doesn't and receive equal attention and the food sovereignty
compensation is also because of its origin it and talking about kind of
access to you and purveying a food or kind of one's ability to control like
have sovereign jurisdiction over one's own kind of access our ability to purvey
and provide for oneself so there's a provider conversation but then there's
also a consumption piece of that and i feel like because
the origin of that stop boot sovereignty discussion was on the provision side of
things it has has it's been hard to kind of take up in more nutrition and
consumption oriented discussion take a bit more like stands I the
question I expect you're the reason I like these issues I think we often
undervalue the significance of acting and I think that's in part because we've
lost some sense of what municipalities and local governance is really not right
that we just think about it as another bubble the city the second businesses
and county and ours the course and then we find in you know the Musil govern a
key episode show and how I started but their alternative ways of thinking about
the city can break this out some of the local bar manager original formulation
is alternative forms of Association outside of the state so you say that we
can recapture some of that understanding in law and in practice by I think I actually already presents us
with way it's not simply scale approach to national and I think the municipal
intervention also offers us an opportunity to transcend some of the
scalar issues that we were talking about or combine them and unique ways because
I'm inherent to living in a municipality is the idea of existing in a local
community and environment in which individuals are mobile and constantly
moving through that environment in a physical and also a temporal sense so
how they create their space like pathways through those spaces and
perhaps when we're designing a lot we don't need to think of populations as
bodies of kind of eaters or as providers but we need to think about how the
population stem cells are moving through these scales right right hey
guys I think our emails away whether their skills how we defined them in you
know sensible ways you know simple suppose of a food shack right coming out
of the reservation and this is probably kind of a bit of yes or no you can
discuss maybe if there's more or less danger tubing that in terms of
unintended consequences so this idea of like and Montreal over the shark fin
legislation we're going to be recommendations like in terms of the
shark and they gave Larry something that it's a retailer that serve sharpens but
it's not necessarily based on sharpens itself but then I'm targeting a wider
swath then I just say like this answer I'm
seriously there isn't there I would say that there is a risk to that but it
occurred to me when I was thinking about the sharpen case in Toronto that an
argument was made that the municipal bylaw was discriminatory towards Chinese
businesses as the main purveyors of our Chinese community as as the main
purveyor of the shark fin and that like it was interesting to me that that did
not hold on me and I wasn't sure if it was in the way the argument was made or
just because so we probably the best amusing point in the sense that as a
matter of the case new charter planes brought versus let's say you bring it a
750 quality claim presume on that basis against the city and the ending things
don't they challenge the law as all dividers outside of the jurisdiction as
any question to be is why that wasn't included as part of the claim I think
partly is remotely just because they assume that actually of course you know
that's a kind of big block only that's available but the way they had this by
lock which they write and that a charter plane may be just and it wasn't working
or wasn't going to be on that because that's not the way which kind of course
seeing so dozen people answers to Madame simply wasn't it would even addresses it
my god bless you in case I see things but in a remember this idea that
you know once to move different scales there are forms of law that seems to
make more of a sense now yeah so big question about you know just worry about
the way which have this idea that local law operates in a different way right
but the concern of course you know we often think about the zoning laws in
particular was that they were they were created to do laundry facilities weren't
allowed in this part of town appear to regulate civilian uses but we're in fact
music's we're way of my curriculum trans in every lab they were thinly veiled
distributed local regulations but I met because me sounds operated yeah you know
part of the question here and it's it's actually true and also the happening
about my art museum where the my batteries were rejected which is
beginning and fast restaurants near schools right it's only through kind of
rare made these are so strongly fine distinctions and you just have a straw
which is about the