 Alright, so good afternoon everyone. We'll get started. I want to welcome you to the Health Law Institute seminar series and to acknowledge first that we were that we are on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kma and we honor the Mi'kma 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 am 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's own who are here with us today. Professor Catherine Ma from the Faculty of Health and Professor Jamie Baxter from the 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 arm chair conversation between law and public health and I 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. 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 talk we kind of did vision in the nature of an arm chair conversation and I think kind of true to form that's what we're really hoping it'll be and so we kind of have a set of questions that we threw around and talked about before this and we're going to sort of use 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 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 and a public health researcher and so it's really an attempt to kind of talk across I guess disciplinary boundaries and kind of fields about some of 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 certain legal field that's really connected I think in a very disciplinary way to others who 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 are on the scale of becoming central to 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 as 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 this is kind of trading on how geographers tend to think about these concepts the ideas of space kind of physical space is really important to scale but also time so we can think about different scales of space you know zooming in and zooming out on physical space and as well time shorter durations of time and longer durations of time and the scale dimensions of that. We can also I think think about quantitative scale the kind of Google map version that you can focus in on a particular house or neighborhood or way out on a world map but also this idea of qualitative scale that there's a real difference from even understanding you know a city for example by looking at a map of that city or reading a travel writer's narrative description of that walking around that city at that level right the same area of the world as it were but from very different quality of perspectives and what that scales are so just give you a couple ways I think of that and then Kathy has some points about public health. 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 who's been in my epidemiology class the classic epidemiological triad is person come on site it with me person which are kind of the three parameters by which we think of how to describe populations collect data around populations and think also about the interventions that we might put in place to improve the health of those populations. So do you want to start with the next? Yeah okay so I'm going to start with just a few assumptions just at the front because I thought you know we're going to I think we're going to 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 the last decade or so only related to tobacco which sometimes supersedes it. 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 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's 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 we're going to start with in terms of scale and space and time support seem kind of pretty abstract and conceptual and probably that's what's kind of interesting and cool about them but in order to kind of bring that down to earth we also thought it would be helpful to talk about a couple of kind of tangible case studies in which you know kind of law has tried to intervene and produce 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 and so it will just do a group description of those cases before we get into discussion. Yeah absolutely. So the first one that we're really highlighting is the recently failed federal senate bill S228 which is a marketing to kids restriction. This died on the order paper just prior to the election in 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 in this audience here today has the benefit of receiving the readings in advance so 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 kind of way of thinking about scale to this kind of problem we have a kind of match case as it were a recent case coming out of Montreal in which there the municipal government enacted a set of land use control zoning restrictions on fast food restaurants in proximity to schools. And so you know if you think about the the basic kind of policy problem is being how to regulate kids access to or exposure to unhealthy foods or knowledge or advertising of those. One way to think through that from a scale perspective is according to jurisdictional right that on the Senate bills the unhelp the advertising regulations were a matter of kind of federal regulation the recent case in Montreal which these zoning regulations were held by the Quebec Superior Court as one of local government law and so one of the ways in which we'll talk about scale and think about scale is as a jurisdictional matter between you know 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 of kind of parallels on the national and local is a set of regulations around shark finning or restrictions on shark finning a practice that in particular animal rights activists and animal lawyers have kind of long advocated for restrictions on through a set of kind of failed federal initiatives to have a ban on the important export of shark fins enacted at a federal level that had failed and then in 2011 the Toronto City Council enacted a ban on the possession consumption and sale of shark fin products within the Toronto City of Toronto now shark fins are often a culinary item they're eating as a kind of specialty item to make a particular shark fin soup and Toronto's then an activist ban to try to prevent those practices as well as any transactions that ban was struck down by the Ontario Superior Court as being outside of the jurisdiction of the local government of Toronto and then in 2000 just last year in the summer we get a successful federal ban on shark finning that finally goes through in part. So again the dynamics between you know kind of federal and local. 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 infringements upon the players at hand we've also unearthed and we'll talk a little bit about the classic charter case Erwin toy that upheld Quebec's 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 in Erwin toy and in the legislation and we're going to talk about kind of how Erwin 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 which you may not get to but as a 30 year that we often think a lot about 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 kind of on the best attempt to bring together several regulatory regimes and regulate health food safety across several different kind of areas of food processing production and provision and so forth and so if we get time we make a back to that one. And this one the last one is also a little bit near and dear to both of us as people who are heavily invested in our local food system and food enterprises. A lot of our research in the food policy lab and Pax Piaz is about retail food environment 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 categories we're going to use to try to run these case studies. One is the kind of jurisdictional questions of thinking about the 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 we comprise you know within let's say any level of jurisdiction how we might you know regulate or intervene to address these challenges. And then finally as Kathy mentioned the idea of scale and surprise when we think about you know who is the kind of regulatory subject how does the size how does an economy of scale that is the size of business from big to small from national or global to local impact the way that we regulate or intervene. And this is very much thinking in progress. The kind of driver for this format is that Jamie and I sat down together to start talking about these various issues we realized that we both unearthed this our 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 ask Jamie some questions in front of you all and for the record I'm recording Noah. And then conversely I have some questions for Kathy as a vision of public health professional and so the idea is to 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 the discussion is self-helpful. 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 of governance is a question of jurisdiction really kind of plays out but one thing maybe that we can start by talking a little bit down and thinking about the child advertising 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 one question I have for you if I could maybe start off and just thinking a little bit about this morning Kathy was from the perspective of public health is the different kind of way which something like expert knowledge right plays out at different jurisdictional scales right so we're talking about the urine 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 at what scale maybe a very different answer than how the law kind of polices you know those kinds of regulations absolutely so why don't I talk a little bit about the the parameters of the scale of what's being governed in terms of Erwin 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 Erwin 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 to find at that time was a 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 nutrition outcomes at the time it was really the idea that all advertising as by nature manipulative to that vulnerable population of of that 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 a 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 major health problem which was defined specifically as obesity and we can talk a little bit about that like whether that's kind of the 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 switched that to 17 years of age so it 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 I wonder given the experience you know of the bill itself that 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 still have 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 know potentially works you know effective so this is exactly where where you raise the alternative to so there's a number of different if we want to actually if we want to promote the health of children to kind of providing access to healthier food one way to do it is to restrict exposure to unhealthy exposure so that wasn't the intent of the bill but another way is at the local scale which was the example that you raised right much real and so I mean one I think that's really interesting about the kind of comparison of you know this initiative it kind of dies at the federal level and then one that you know recently gets upheld at the local level you can ask this question in a very strict order in terms then should we take a lesson from this to be well we ought to focus our energy on cities right as opposed to you know advocating at a national level now you know we can talk a little bit about like the kind of pros and cons of that kind of strategic perspective in light of when how the law approaches it from you know from from this point in time certainly it would seem that 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 in some ways probably a lot more resources to have 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 lesson of the kind of recent cases seems to be that there's been someone more success at the local level and kind of seeing some of these initiatives go 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 visit the local scale so my my question kind of back to you Jamie is how important is that direct relationship between the outcome that we want to achieve which is restricting kind of children's exposure to this harmful item which we've defined as unhealthy food and beverages which we would have to apply some kind of criteria to yeah how important is kind of that direct regulation of that exposure 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 opposed to national law is that local law at that scale often operates kind of scientist right and so you know what zoning restrictions do is you know purport to regulate land use in a kind of often in a pretty neutral frame right so it's really about what land 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 specific about their particular objective so about restricting children's access to you know unhealthy foods or fast foods for example and the point in part of here is that law actually local law municipal law and when courts go to review this legislation they often accept that right 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 they can do it with these tools that often don't seem particularly well suited toward that and a big question in the Montreal case comes up is local government even allowed to really regulate food as a regulatory subject right local governments we normally think about them you know taking out 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 and how municipalities 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 second being a little bit I can't 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 kind of indirectly access the food yeah yeah the food the problem or the solution yeah yeah yeah I think it's a big question and I think you know in part maybe I'll talk a little bit about the end case and result and in your thoughts of this kind of particular question because you know there you get this really interesting result and a member describes you that this is the case where the city of Toronto and active ban on sharpens right as a food product right that gets consumed in Toronto gets transactor on bonds sold in Toronto and you know that restaurants and in person were possessed and all that activities can be banned under this bylaw by the city of Toronto and one of the things then 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 toward and toward what what goal and so they move between these different frames and this is really relevant I think for us today is whether or not this is a health objective you know and in the city of Toronto is 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 sharp populations in far off oceans right here we see another dimension of scale really playing into this question of which is the international 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 any is it uses that idea about territory about space to kind of push down the municipality to cabin its jurisdiction and say no you can't regulate sharks and far off oceans that has nothing to do with the city and the city is responding their arguments are very much in the room it has everything to do with the city in part because one you know sharks are apex predators and if we drive sharks to distinction that's gonna have dramatic global environmental consequences for everyone including people that live in Toronto and two people in Toronto 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 bad oceans you know you can't buy the salmon so these down the road then people in Toronto are still affected in terms of their food choices and so forth now none of those arguments we have for the court because they simply regard this as a matter of space right if you're the outsider inside the city altogether so it does this to a role there I guess and the public health or the city argument was very when I when I read a with the public health kind of glasses to it it really occurred to me that this is the type of arguments like the city was making arguments that public health people made make all the time which alerted me that this is actually a pit fall for potentially in our public health reasoning which was the city argued 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 up yeah no exactly and I think you know partly it illustrates an interesting difference between again coming back to our kind of national and local law literally courts have 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 kind of territorial boundaries in this way to try to kind of cabin them and and do that kind of work and you see that really coming out and the results in the end case despite the fact that much of the case law over the past 20 years or so about these values is that we got to be kind of pushing media spellings up we realized that cities for example are global actors you know they're not just local actors Toronto gets together with New York gets together with London gets together with Milan to regulate climate change to be involved in the Milan food pact in which cities are interacting with one another on a global scale to try and mark out their place in regulating the food system but skipping over a few questions about jurisdictions absolutely so it's enacting that network form of governance that we often talk about and policy and I wanted to kind of go back also to the marketing to kids bill that died on their order 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 within which leads us 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 and beverage the solution was actually an administrative one it was a regulatory state one that Health Canada was already exploring issues within 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 WHO 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 yeah yeah just give me to the second slide because I think partly we were also talking about here on the example of the food advertising you know kind of the kind of ego framers that probably the Senate almost invariably was anticipating when they were thinking about you know the scale and the scope of the way that these particular regulations are being drafted and thinking back to the Erwin Toy case that Kathy was referencing earlier that eventually something like this is going to have to survive a proportionality analysis right and so many of you just in the law students and lawyers in the room will be familiar with the proportionality analysis that is to say the stage of constitutional review under the charter once a rights infringement has been found so in the case of Erwin Toy and infringement it's found a right to free speech whether or not that's a justified infringement in a free and democratic society and integral to that analysis is a proportionality analysis as it were calls it and the basic point here is that from our lens you know proportionality 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 defining as it were the target of the individual in first place is it 13 years old and under is it 17 years older and under and so forth and so the proportionality analysis you know in Erwin Toy and in this case you can imagine is operating is using scale right to kind of calibrate and decide ultimately the validity your constitutionality and the pieces that are often kind of pulled together in public health formulations I think but that really are very much separated when we kind of take a law 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 and 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 they are 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 whose whose harms kind of matter more and to what extent do we believe in the magnitude of harm to each party seems to be really important right and and that there is I think when the courts go to answer those questions often and give you just one example of a kind of inherent tension in the way that the law comes to that particularly from a section one else right so we were talking earlier about the idea those of you who know the kind of section one jurisprudence there are these two elements to that analysis right it's about the rational connection between the regulatory action and and the outcome and then there's minimal impairment of the right and so the rational impaired piece attempts to kind of scale down or scale back the regulatory invention right kinds of tailor it to the objective that's also being that's being realized but that rational connection piece at 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 legislator is attempting to do and there's a kind of realtor relationship obviously between those two parts of the test that really operate along this context of scale one is about how bigly is it where you find the problem of the objective in the middle and parent pieces how closely there's some scale down you tailor that to the potential harm upon the right and so if we can 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 the analysis right and also I think some of the contradictions that courts get into when they go to actually apply that and from a public health perspective when I when I was reading Erwin 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 there would be kind of a harm to the corporation on you know based on this infringement so it was that the company had could just find another method to market 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 right right right that there's some unknown or undefined alternative that ultimately exists yeah yeah I mean it's also you know we haven't talked too much about these idea maybe goes back bit to our previous slide about the kind of interaction between you know the kind of public authorities you might you know be involved in regulating this and the kind of private sector and maybe this is a bit of a segue into our last piece in sort of thinking about you know some scale of enterprise but just to give you an example of you know ways in which this kind of gets left out the story back to the indication shark fin regulation there is actually an entity or set of entities out there in the private sector that took the lead on banning shark bins or trying to move forward restrictions on shark fin markets that had to do with the transportation of those shark bins across national boundaries and it was the airline companies and so particularly some of these Asian airline companies they were operating in and out of the countries where there's higher demand for shark fins in active policies right that said they were no longer going to carry those across national borders as part of the kind of import export process and so you know again thinking about the ways in which you might build scales of advocacy or momentum around particular issues my read about it starts in part with the airlines they're the first movers then it comes from some of the municipalities and maybe we ultimately get results at the national level and then looping back up to the Senate bill the question is to what extent is that private sector innovation I guess outside of having law in place and to what extent is that effective in achieving your overall purpose for the legislation in the first place 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 and 10 to the University of Cal University of Ottawa has found that actually those companies that were signatories to the voluntary self-regulatory pledge were more likely to advertise or they had a greater proportion of advertising in her assessment of children's television advertising than did other companies yeah yeah I think this is kind of on this game again part of our early discussions about what forms of kind of association or kind of collective action we're thinking about scale are actually most kind of effective right so we asked the first question through the scales of governance we've now kind of brought in you know alternative forms and so if we start thinking about all of the different possibilities that kind of opens up our mind or makes it more alive to you know what those alternative modes of governance are we talk about saying you never covered 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 explain 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 intersectoral workshop in Newfoundland Labrador to discuss what does a healthy retail food environment or what does specifically a healthy corner store in rural Newfoundland 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 attributes and if you can kind of 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 a level of the of the community is it only kind of transactional or is it does a community does a community store provide a community service or is it about the relationship between 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 therefore can speak on behalf of the community that that makes it healthy so this is the picture here yeah I think you have a major theme of course in kind of the food world generally whether or not it's from the public health or legal or other perspective it's really all about localism these days right and so whether or not it's access to kind of local foods or the significance of local production in you know our kind of communities and economies what are they kind of help impacts and consequences what are the consequences for you know I guess things like food insecurity or access to food there are lots of discussion centers around the local which is of course a scalar concept here and so you know one of the ways in which that kind of perspective on scale kind of again opens up the set of questions is to kind of understand that when often when lots I'm seen or 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 safety for Canadians Act these new food safety regulations is that that approach is adopted we call it kind of risk mitigating or a risk-centered approach now food processors or providers have to register with the CFIA the Canadian food inspection agency they have to take preemptive measures to ensure that their businesses and whatnot are safe and they have to ensure the traceability of their food throughout the supply system now these all seem like really good ideas they're into the 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 kind of highly biased against smaller producers right in which the regulatory burden of this kind of risk approach is disproportionately a lot on small enterprises it's probably one that larger enterprises are already well tailored to to address and so there's a question practical questions is that how local businesses or smaller businesses are going to be able to navigate some of these regulations in a way that they ultimately have some of the matter of acknowledging the differential burden has really come up in other instances of food and nutrition interventions that have come into play so 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 and that 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 safe food in the city of Toronto around food handling regulations so the 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 coming back to your point about you know the responses to this exercise and the role of things like community relationships and trust right is very much that those service the kind of bases are underpinning for you know advocates of you know kind of alternative regulatory regime sometimes so in the food safety example that the reason why I consider food safe when I go to my local farm and I buy some meat that was butchered on site or by a mobile avatar that goes out to that farm and does the butchering is because I trust the farmer and I know them right I have a relationship with them that's the basis of my food safety regime as it were but that's a very different mode of governance at a very different scale than one that is you know provisionally or nationally enacted and depends much more on these concepts of kind of freedom to risk and what has 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 you were using those exemplars as an example of why the whole piece of legislation was appropriate right right and then just as a last example kind of trains at home with having to say I think is that's restaurant the zoning regulation case I was talking about in Montreal earlier where 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 kind of arbitrary distinction because the zoning only applied to restaurants without table service and so the consequence of that which is really interesting is that that exactly regulated out Harvey's and W and McDonald's but it left in place them all in pop shops who were serving and this is the point made by 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 diner then you weren't captured by the regulation but because of the distinction it was really about the decision between table service or not with that exactly that forms are to regulate the scale of the enterprise they was all captured and in our lab we're we're actually doing a systematic review it's led by me Taylor one of our PhD students looking at how we even kind of typologize 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 how is it the time maybe we will stop talking ourselves and then open it up and say questions yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah because that's of course one possible response right oh yeah okay absolutely um so yeah so what you're referring to is that sponsorship so for example I guess the Tim Horton's hockey team like sponsorship which is usually is actually not covered or was not covered by that legislation or was proposed to not be covered in the latest state of where the discussion was 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 on you know recreation facility recreation facility kind of the advertising that's around hockey arena or on the jerseys themselves so that was that was definitely a sticking point but also unresolved but probably not going to be included and probably won't be included in future versions of the bill as far as oh now now this is also on tape so as far as I know this this bill I think there's great interest in this bill moving forward from many actually across and 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 the bill in the first place that that's could I read on the situation 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 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 reading for 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 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 percent about 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 yeah thanks so much for the conversation format I liked it you know sometimes 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 buried 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 to think about scale because even in your conversation you 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 of so many other that you can pitch it at different questions at the outset so it's not the scale of the problem is an interesting one to start and my second question is children are such an interesting thing and I really say thing because in policy debates they are a thing they are a thing so 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 they will have over a lifetime or like what is it a time scale thing is it a scale with respect to children because of 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 the 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 at 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 yeah to think about why these food regulations have such this obsessive quality with children although we just heard I think there's a great points during I think on the first one right in terms of you're kind of thinking about the definition of the problem and it kind of comes back to the way I kind of started in our introduction to say this idea of food or food law right as the kind of framing for these problems has become you know one that like lawyers and and and the researchers are recently interested in and in this 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 kind of because it's big it's it's implicit I think in defining something as a food problem to scale it up in part 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 disconnecting issues of consumption or processing or production or waste flows and so forth but the enormity of the way which the problems kind of come at you in the complexes when you kind of adopt that lens I think is is is challenging and I never know how to answer the question I haven't yet figured out the answer to the question of how you kind of fit that with our more established categories of law right which which all which bring their own problem definitions along with that and so you know the idea is to give you an example of your moving between these frames is the health question is an environmental question is it other aspects of being involved in and I think partly in that case the course of ability to actually move between those as part of the quarter makes more is actually no render this bylaw you know ultraviolet is outside of the kind of scalar scope of the municipality so I guess I'll just say that like your question I think is about what I would say is like exactly what does it mean to sort of adopt something they call food law is that a useful way about time thinking these problems because of you know partly the scale issues implicitly that's the dissimilar definition the practical I mean the practical objective also of public health is like public health so there is a tendency to kind of have health as the 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 confers 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 when we're talking about these problems and really I think that's what that why the earlier Quebec legislation was successful just one more point on the last piece about being about kids in this example and so this morning my son was making pretend granola bars and he said to me dad mine is gluten-free but yours has Brussels sprouts and it doesn't and I just thought like it's kind of amazing actually how much he knows like a world which he lives in about the kinds of free choices he's making is like very different from the world I feel like I kind of grew up in that sort of thing that like you know the choice that we make is a kind of family is the way that we kind of regulate food at that level and I think kind of when we think about actually jurisdiction of scale and this is where some of the law endographers I think are kind of pushing us to think you know your conventional lines of national global and local are actually insufficient that we actually think about jurisdiction as within the family for example we could think about at all of these different scales and probably what that scalar concept helps to do is break out of these kind of more formal categories I guess the other way of saying that is that scale is not actually the same thing as jurisdiction but lawyers tend to assume that that's so and even though we might think about jurisdiction as a technical concept that fits these categories we might usefully actually think about a family as a jurisdictional entity and how that might help us then to maybe answer some of these questions. And the dissent, so my thought on the child aspect of it is the dissent on Irwin Toi says that it was really like children grow up to be adults so you know this is a nuisance for now but we anticipate that this that over time kind of introducing the time scale that we talked about we didn't kind of really get into you that children eventually acquire those abilities so in a way that the setting of an age to define that class of vulnerability is arbitrary not also recognized. The whole movement of food sovereignty as opposed to food health or to food safety comes into your research. The movement itself was relevant to this kind of a regular framework that comes out from different places. Do you have a question? I think the food sovereignty aspect is interesting for me and I think that maybe you can understand that concept but in my opinion the genealogy of that is coming from my grassroots you know kind of via campesina so it's the kind of natural presence movement social movement one of the purposes of that concept food sovereignty I think is to break us out of these traditional third-party it's the kind of highlighted and also been challenged the idea that how we normally think about and laws role in regulating food for example is very much a kind of liberal understanding of law it's about how the state is a threat to individual rights and that plays out in the advertising case and in many others but that food sovereignty wants to think about the idea that we can regulate or approach food in a very different way between the market and the state and conventionally understanding of those communities or self-converting or establishing between themselves as sovereign so I think that's kind of partly where that idea of food sovereignty comes in it's a kind of challenge to scale and jurisdiction at that part and it's interesting always to me that it's particularly the idea of food sovereignty because I think when lawyers see that idea you know we have very particular definitions and understanding of what sovereignty means from a legal perspective but my opinion on it is it doesn't match exactly the meaning of that word when it gets deployed in this sense which is not some kind of super prior national or international concept about the relationship between nation states it's really about the significance of self-governance and self-organization for working within and living within food systems in a different kind of way so I never actually clearly understood why it was food sovereignty I don't see why I think I understand the purpose of the impact before but I think it's a scalar question because it's kind of a challenge to have the premises of some of the piece and another kind of piece of the continuum I sometimes think about that I think hasn't really been resolved very well or it doesn't kind of receive equal attention and the food sovereignty compensation is also because of its origin and talking about kind of access to and purveying a food or kind of one's ability to control like have sovereign jurisdiction over one's own kind of access or 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 thought food sovereignty discussion was on the provision side of things it has been hard to kind of take up in more nutrition and consumption-oriented discussion We'll just also say we just ran into a question that opens it up and this is like an opportunity to take a bit more of a like stand-up question I asked earlier which is about like where do you think the most effective kind of points of intervention are on some of these issues I think we often undervalue the significance of acting at the municipal and local level and I think that's in part because we've lost some sense of what municipalities and local governance is really about that we just think about it as another level of the state with a different set of capabilities and a certain set of value in powers that get run into by the courts and then we find in the municipal government the social or the health sector but there are alternative ways of thinking about the city or about local government that I think in the frame of food sovereignty can break us out some of the ways in which we get it that they say local government is a regional formulation and we start thinking about the most corporate energies that I said is alternative forms of association outside of the state individual kind of dynamic I mean so they said that we could recapture some of that understanding in law and in practice by taking action at the local level or through the ecological government I think that actually already presents us with a way to take some of that action and not simply operating a different scale in the sense of it's closer to home or it's a more piecemeal approach than a national approach but you think that it represents a different kind of governance or is it a possibility of a different kind of governance? 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 in unique ways because of inherent to living in a municipality is the idea of existing in a local community an 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 kind of need to think of populations as bodies of kind of eaters or as providers but we need to think about how the populations themselves are moving through these scales Right, right Yeah, that's exactly right and then also like what those scales, how do we define them in you know, insensible ways you know, some of the things that are supposed to be a food shed right, coming out of the natural resource that is drawn in a watershed right, that maybe we should think about scales at the level of the resource as it were whatever that kind of means in the food world as opposed to maybe some of these more arbitrary decisions about local traditional international and probably because it's dynamic any of the people the things move through the system A little bit of time there are other questions I'm just curious, so like talking at the municipal level about a crafting policy that has indirect approaches or indirect implementation and this is probably kind of a bit of yes and no but if you could discuss maybe if there is more or less danger doing that in terms of unintended consequences so this idea of like and once you're all over the shark fin legislation we're going through indirect implementations like in terms of the shark fin maybe I'll try to do something that it's a retailer that serves shark fins but it's not necessarily based on shark fins itself but then I'm targeting a wider swath of the population not necessarily like there's an answer I'm just curious again like to discuss that a little bit there is a, there I would say that there is a risk to that but it occurred to me when I was thinking about the shark fin case in Toronto that an argument was made that the municipal bylaw was discriminatory towards Chinese businesses as the main purveyors or in Chinese communities as the main purveyor of the shark fin and that like it was interesting to me that that did not hold up and I wasn't sure if it was in the way the argument was made or just because so part of that I mean it's an interesting point in the sense that as a matter of the case no charter claims brought versus possibility that is to say you could bring it a section 15 claim on equality claim on that basis against the city and yet the claims don't they challenge the law as ultra virus outside of the jurisdiction as part of the claim I think part of the answer may well be just because they assume that actually courts you know that's a kind of big law kind of idea right that that's available but that the way to get at this bylaw which it turns out they are right at which is to get at what courts are generally concerned about and you tell is that they are acting as out of affiliate powers right and that a charter claim maybe just and it wasn't worth being or it wasn't going to be so they didn't want to focus on that that's not the way in which kind of courts see and not regulate the municipal action in that way although still doesn't influence or survive simply wasn't it wasn't even addressed as a kind of collateral issue in the case despite the fact that that seems like a clear line of argumentation that the claims are taking but it may represent this idea that once you move to different scales there are different forms of law that seem to make more or less sense depending on what kind of scale you're operating now I also think that the question about you know this worry about the way which around this idea that the local law operates in a different way right what the concern about kind of doing that would be of course you know we often think about the zoning laws in particular and the history of zoning laws as a kind of tool of exclusion of communities right that often what zoning laws did was that they were created to exclude the two individuals some of the early cases that laundry facilities weren't allowed in this part of town appeared to regulate simply blame uses but more in fact in these cases were way of trying to change Americans out of the different neighborhoods and they were you know it's going to be veiled discriminatory local regulations but that because municipalities operate through this category of land use it becomes this really kind of easy cover for doing lots of other things that they're trying to take it at now part of the question here and it's it's actually true in the Montreal case that kind of also is happening but we might argue it's to worry that much better area for objective which is bathing kind of faster restaurants near schools right that municipalities draw which is about the uses of the space is it restaurant table service or is it restaurant service that they're using that lever towards some kind of broader now the question we're going to have to get back is a difficult one but it's like a repurposing the problem that we often think about in the municipal context and I think it's so that's where it's incumbent on a public health researcher to actually propose looking down the pathway of the intended and unintended consequences and to build like an evidence base around that to say these are the potential differential impact like if you're taking a health equity lens in mind which is yeah what are the differential impacts for different sub-populations and to build that into the original legislation I think It's also a great question actually for public health particulars is what role public health and actors in these cases and disputes actually play and it's actually a really interesting in comparison go back to the end case on Sharpen's looking at the city council debates in the record in that case when they were debating whether they were going to pass this organization the city has hearings and then we can see that they're pretty good at participatory governance in this way opening up a council meeting that because they're local governments people can actually go into the town hall and make their voices heard but who are the experts it's a little chef it's not a public health expert about the harms of potential neuro-topsins that are associated with consuming sharp finger sharp meat it's a chef who he's kind of getting at some of those ideas and the court picks up on that starting then the bylaw to say the person isn't a public health expert this person is a chef they're kind of trying to use this local knowledge and trying to figure out what the right person of the community is but the court uses exactly that evidence to strike down the bylaw right and it's pretty fascinating to see that is the kind of role of expertise so that goes back to your original question it's kind of who's knowledge and who's like the kind of the role of expertise in defining those different categories it's absolutely salient and should it be like members of the community who are closest to that or should it be public health or someone else who doesn't have public health even the fact that quite often if you go to such one house get all kinds of after evidence and then they say at the end of the day well we're just not sure so there's a margin of appreciation here in any of that it's a question of certainty it comes through the point of some signs that are of expertise is only to take it open question to get it across that's a nice way to end with a question so on behalf of everyone here just thank you so much for including us in your conversation it was great