MUNICIPALITIES ‘HAVE OPPORTUNITIES’ TO IMPROVE HEALTH
Only in the past decade have cities started to encourage healthy lifestyles and good nutrition
Kim Bergeron, a public health consultant with Public Health Ontario and an adjunct assistant professor at Queen’s University, is an authority on how cities can use bylaws and other local powers to improve the health of residents.
“We often don’t drill down to look at access to food, but certainly where a supermarket, or a farmer’s market, or a community garden, or a fast-food outlet is located is a land-use planning decision and municipalities have opportunities to provide direction,” she told the Star.
The following interview has been condensed and edited. Is the use of urban planning powers to promote public health a relatively newer area of activity for municipalities? Do they have a lot of experience?
In Canada, public health and municipal land-use planners really began to look at the issues starting in about 2005 and really started to think about how community design can enhance or impede human behaviours.
Why didn’t they do it before? Why was it only in 2005?
Land-use planning came out of public health in the 1800s. The first documentation of where housing was came when the cholera outbreak happened and they were going door to door to do surveys. The two professions worked closely but then divided. By the 21st century, we were suffering with the epidemic of obesity. That’s really been the catalyst that has reconnected the professionals of planning and public health, just because there’s evidence now that demonstrates the impact of the built environment on health and the relationship between access to places with healthy food and access to places of physical activity.
Some of the examples that come immediately to mind, like New York City’s soda-pop ban, or the court challenge that has been launched in Montreal, have made it to the courts and sometimes they have been overturned. Is it a surprise they are facing such rigorous challenges?
I think that part of the challenge in developing these types of bylaws is around the idea of the nanny state . . . We’ve seen it when the tobacco industry was challenging municipal bylaws restricting smoking in public spaces.
It’s a similar argument where the industry viewpoint is the perception of private businesses that they are overstepping their boundaries.
Are they? Do municipalities have sufficient powers to legislate in this area of public health, or do they need more powers?
Certainly in Ontario, municipalities have the opportunity to create supportive physical and social environments through bylaws. As long as the bylaw complements and does not conflict with existing government legislation, or there is no relevant provincial or federal legislation that exists, or to strengthen existing legislation. When you look at the history of restricting smoking in public spaces, municipalities could pass that bylaw because it met all those conditions. The provincial government said it might make sense to have provincial legislation.