Health Promotion ministries get no respect

The news that Nova Scotia has the lowest rate of teen smokers of all Canadian provinces makes you wonder: why?

There are a number of possible explanations for Nova Scotia's success at combating youth smoking: anti-smoking legislation, increased social stigmatization, the rising price of cigarettes, the accumulating evidence that warns of the dangers of not only smoking but also of second-hand smoke exposure.

But all of those reasons, it seems, point to one major difference between Nova Scotia as well as Ontario, where teen smoking rates only just barely exceed those of Nova Scotia, compared to the rest of the provinces: Nova Scotia and Ontario are the only provinces with entire government ministries devoted to Health Promotion.

Quantifying the effect of establishing a new ministry on smoking prevalence is probably an impossible task; there are too many variables. But, based on limited evidence like the rate of teen smoking, the country's two Health Promotion ministries appear so far to have been successful, just three years now after the ministry was established in Ontario's case, and less than two in Nova Scotia's.

Why don't other provinces have Health Promotion ministries? In a time when preventive medicine is an increasingly popular buzz word, one would think the provincial governments would be eager to add a Health Promotion Minister to their cabinets.

The federal government's recent proposal to can the Canadian Health Network website -- the flagship publication of the Public Health Agency of Canada's Centre for Health Promotion -- means that the feds probably aren't about to push the provinces too hard to get moving on their own Health Promotion ministries.

The absence of dedicated departments of the government for health promotion initiatives in the majority of Canadian provinces is somewhat ironic given the fact that the World Health Organization's 1986 agreement on health promotion is called The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, after its host city.

Click here to read about Ontario's Ministry of Health Promotion, headed up by lawyer Margarett Best.

Click here to read about Nova Scotia's Ministry of Health Promotion and Protection, led by former real estate agent Barry Barnet.

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